Clothing is an intimate manufactured thing with which we use to communicate, we use to warm ourselves, protect ourselves, almost figurative because its shaped to us. Something about breaking down something that’s cloth, that’s clothing, its more than just figuring out how its made, I’m breaking down the barrier between the person and the world.
Beginning with clothes, how I first started being interested in them, starting with the figure, then clothing, then breaking it down, and then becoming interested in the manufactured element of it, and that moving into broader materiality. How my interest in this “making” which is vague, came from something specific.
Seeing how clothes are made overseas, most people don’t know where their food comes from, using this language to access a much broader conceptual thing: we are torn from being intimate with our immediate world. Globalization and technology has resulted in a loss of intimacy. Today, product is disconnected from process; life is disconnected from life. We are disconnected from the production of our food, our loved ones, wars waged, and the making of our clothes. There is dimmed distinctness of need for all the deep, simple necessities. Real is torn from real, Facebook friends from actual friends; processed food from organically grown food, knowing from knowing. It is impossible to have respect without knowing, that is, without intimacy. (inHere)
My goal with my thesis at first was to get people more intimate with the stuff that they interact with everyday. It morphed this thing that we all know, we are all familiar with patterns, you see an outline of a t-shirt and you know exactly what it is. But its not necessarily something you have interacted with or seen, or even touched yourself. At its most basic, it is a flat shape. You see what a three dimensional shape looks like when its flat. And taking that and morphing it into something entirely different in its essence because it becomes a big consuming environment that you can’t ignore. Taking these objects that are easily dismissed, that are normal things in our culture and drawing attention to them and how they’re unique and strange. There are a lot of strange things that we don’t pay close attention to. Part of my goal was to make them known or teach people, but it was also to make them strange—to highlight how strange it is. In the same way the map piece, Reconstructed Destination, reveals how weird freeways are. Road systems are so strange and interesting. By cutting along each highway and re-stitching them back together, it makes that more apparent, showing where lines, roads bisect farms, lines mingle and come and go, develop and destroy themselves. After embarking on the task of taking apart and reassembling a map along its highways, I had to run my sewing machine, essentially drive, every highway. A lot of art work being done right now that I find interesting is process oriented. Its so fundamental—you look at something and you see the detail, and its done by hand. The process of doing something laborious, tedious, and the energy that goes into making it is apparent which makes it all the more interesting.
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