HOMAGE TO KEPT CLOTH

Over the past few years I have collected quotes from friends regarding their personal associations with cloth and the variety of meaning and nostalgia it can provide. This has inspired me to look at my own kept cloth – there is plenty – and re-experience my own connections, bringing them into the present through a series of art works.

It gives me great pleasure to keep my clothes, my dresses, my stockings, I have never thrown away
a pair of shoes of mine in 20 years. I cannot separate myself from my clothes nor Alain’s – The pretext is that they are still good – it is my past and as rotten as it was I would like to take it and hold it tightly in my arms.

 

Louise Bourgeois 1968

I became aware of the importance of the tactile qualities of cloth when I came across my first book as a child – looking at the illustrations I was so familiar with the images, but not just visually. I remembered the smoothness to the touch of Old King Cole’s hose and the soft, satin plumpness of the quilt on a kitten’s bed. As a small child I had the sensual experience of touch through looking and imagining. This way of remembering I found mystifying, then I realised I am continuously drawn to feel the quality of a piece of clothing on a shop rail, a roll of cloth in a fabric shop or any other cloth just in passing – it is the sense of touch that is important to me and that feeds my imagination.

The skills of our grandparents – dressmaking, pattern cutting, lacemaking, mending have become a thing of the past. Knitting and crochet, once familiar to most women and girls, have almost become a novelty craft. The exotic names for different forms of cloth – Georgette, Chiffon, Crépe de Chine etc. have little meaning for people no longer handling and working with them on a regular basis and which are so often replaced with a synthetic alternative. I can hear my grandmother, who was a milliner, enthusing over Moygashel, my mother claiming her suit was made from Barathea. 

My first ballet tunic was Pique, evening dresses would be made from Taffeta, Organza, Devoré – delicious evocative words.