folly: on fabric as skin and story
Thousands of black fingerprints dance along the seams, tracing hours of labour. Each fabric tile holds a story, as they were hand-cut from used clothing donated by friends, family and fellow classmates. The culmination of these garments into one art piece reflects the vast networks of the global textile trade embedded in everyday clothing.
Our artistic code from the dresses manifests itself in architectural form: continuing with our hands saturated in black ink to denote the touch of the maker, we wrapped a rigid frame in a fluid, hand-sewn envelope. This contrast between hard and soft, structure and wrapping, allowed us to explore the material qualities and transformative potential of fabric as architectural skin. Our folly revealed qualities of textiles we hadn’t fully appreciated before — their varying textures, permeability and the way that they filter colour and light has the ethereal qualities of stained glass.
soft architecture: dressing the city with care Moving from our folly to an architectural installation, we wanted to adopt a more precise and tectonic system. We were planning on continuing to work with donated garments until we stumbled upon the slow-fashion equivalent of gold: bags of pristine men’s suit samples in a dumpster. We brought the fabric samples to our studio and contacted the clothing brands in the area where we found them. Eventually, Surmesur, a local Montreal custom suit tailor, confirmed our suspicions. They had been doing a seasonal purge and were happy to supply us with additional fabric samples, as our project would prevent them from entering landfills.
all images: sierra dustin + chloe watkinson
40 on site review 47 :: standing still
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