Ever since my 2019 installation “I Never Played With Dolls” in which I enjoyed a collaboration with actor/activist Julia Greene I've mentally explored ways to introduce regular collaboration into my practice.
I recently realized that incorporating collaboration in one's art can be something as simple as talking aloud with a trusted someone about an idea or concept previously only considered in the privacy of one's own head.
And so it was that after a long conversation with a friend who worked for a well-known charity shop, a vague endeavor which I had in mind for a while, to create a body of work surrounding an examination of the clothing industry, with reflection on my own choices and what those choices reveal about my personal ethics and allegiances emerged.
Have you ever wondered what happens to all those shoes and clothes after they've been donated and then, after spending some time on the charity shop racks, remain unwanted? My eye-witness explained that inside a giant warehouse space known in the industry as a “rag-out” room, the unwanted items are transformed into ½ ton clothing cubes, which are then stacked to the ceiling like giant bales of hay. After which they are shipped off/back to China.
Already cognizant of the extreme environmental and human costs of “fast fashion,” I wanted to dive deeper. In a future post, I'll share some of the research. But for now, here are images of the progress of art piece number one, from a new series with the working title of “The Clothes We Wear.”
Worn cotton t shirts make great buffing rags for my encaustic paintings. After deconstructing most of a worn out tee, the remaining structure tossed out on my work table looked to me just like a woman's bib top skirt.
A lot of the process I'm interested in right now has to do with the transformative qualities of waxing a piece of cloth. Having never “encausticized” a knit fabric before, I first tested the outcome. My preferred qualities of stiffening and transparency still show true even with a t's cotton knit fabric.
Somewhere during the pondering of what text to stitch, I read the t-shirt's label. I'm still shaking my head at the quirky nature of the phrase I appropriated to symbolize our international clothing manufacturing process: “Assembled in Mexico of US Components.”
For an abstract painter who prides herself in a “Without Knowing” approach to applying paint to panel, it is at once ironic and amusing that I'm finding great pleasure in using a thread and needle to draw and write text in a very representational style.
The act of making marks on this flexible cloth substrate one stitch at a time, is simultaneously meditative and contemplative. With a creative history of word-smithing, bringing text into my visual art is brilliantly pleasurable and satisfying.
Tools and materials. Waxed black linen transformed into encausticized scrolls which I’ll use to construct the sculpture.
Super jazzed about constructing! Figuring out how to shape the waxed, stitched fabric. Here, I realized I could firm up the top of the sculpture by “stitching” the wire through the stiff waxed fabric.
WIP: I expect to add a lot more of the red, waxed threads, connecting them with the tiny black wax scrolls.
“Assembled Components (in progress)” aka Assembled in Mexico of US Components. Deconstructed Man's T-Shirt, St. John's Bay (JCP), thread, linen, beeswax, damar resin.
And to think, it all started with a conversation with a friend. I look forward to further opportunities for conceptualizing the creative possibilities of Collaboration.