The process of undoing
Clothes are my way of looking at the world and understanding it. Textiles in general provide me the answers that others look for elsewhere. To me, they contain multitudes. When the clothing has been worn, that is, previously owned by a person who put it on their body and went about their business in it, it contains the world. Everything that person may have experienced, done, said, felt while wearing that article of clothing are embedded into its fibers, simply by having been worn, and hopefully, loved at some point.
So by taking it apart, here is what I see...
Threads – I see the threads that held all the different pattern pieces together. The threads that made the piece possible, that allowed for the person to wear it and exist in the world. Those threads are everything. And are not thought about or considered. The garment, when seen, renders the threads invisible, and it becomes held together by magic. Of course we know they are there, but do we know they are there? They only become obvious when something goes wrong: a seam rips, comes undone, etc. So these threads, these all important threads must be commemorated in some way. I take the garment apart to see the threads.
Pattern pieces – I see the way in which the garment was pieced together, pieced together using the threads. But the threads would have nothing to hold on to if there weren't bits of cloth cut into shapes to sew together. Certain pieces cut in a certain way to give a certain shape, a certain drape, a certain feel to the finished piece. To highlight one area or another. These pieces, in the hierarchy of visibility, are slightly more visible. Rendered visible through the seams, and the way in which they work with the body. It is important to lay out these pieces and look at them, understand the way they work together to form what they form. Because they form bodies. Empty bodies. And sometimes in the folds there is dust, dirt, hair. It is the disgusting accumulation of a life lived, the crevices, crannies, nooks, the existence of which we ignore. But they are there, documenting ever so quietly a life lived.
Cloth – Finally we have the actual cloth itself. The most visible, the one that is in constant touch with our body when we wear the garment. The barrier, the protection, the everything. But it cannot work without thread, cannot do its job as a garment if it isn't cut and sewn in a specific way.
The whole – The threads, pattern pieces and cloth are nothing without each other, and create everything when together. When we take these clothes apart after years of togetherness, what we get is a record of their collaboration, of them working together, to provide the wearer with protection, warmth, safety. It is this: the traces of the thread, the pattern pieces and the cloth working together to provide the wearer, the body with something so basic and important it is impossible to live without. These traces, these clues and bits and pieces provide us with intangible tangibility. By that I mean, they offer up proof of the unknowable and invisible.
In practice – So what might happen if we get it back down to its most basic form? What if we take the pieces of the cloth and take it apart, and then, to look at it anew, reweave it into it's original shape? What happens then? And how do we decide how we are going to weave what, and how?