“Art not as investment but as divestment — pulling off the vestments, stripping down. No hieratic garb, no fungible currency: we get to make what we make because we cut it out of the clothes we were wearing when we wept.”
My work explores the fundamentality of humanness by focusing on the traces bodies leave on cloth with wear and over time. I explore the emotional, unnamable quality of clothing by taking apart used clothing in order to know it, understand it, and ultimately discover something which is hidden in its original form. My process is two-fold: first, I take apart the garment, carefully unpicking the seams and saving the threads that hold the pieces together (and whatever dust or dirt that has nestled into the seams). I then begin deconstructing the independent pattern pieces through unweaving, reweaving, sewing, and composing to uncover that which I find most appealing about them – the punctum. The punctum is simply the recognition of humanness (a fulguration!), a connection between our own humanness and that of others. Thus by memorializing the threads of wear, I discover the life the cloth lived and the phantom of the person who wore it.
Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Otto von Busch’s Notebook on Textile Punctum: Embroidery of Memory form the basis of my theoretical thinking. Von Busch takes Barthes’ photographic theories and applies them to the clothing we wear every day, thus expanding the meaning of the punctum. In utilizing the ideas put forth by Roland Barthes and Otto von Busch, I want to discover the life of the clothing ‘beyond’.