It was 7am on a migraine day and she wasn’t up to much, so she idly began examining the labels on the contents of her wardrobe, listing them as she lay in bed.
She isn’t a clothes buyer; familiar, timeworn, outmoded and charity shop purchases form the most part.
A revelation, why had she never scrutinised them before?
A container of ‘made ins’ from across the globe:
From countries visited, where she could imagine the makers, India, Cambodia, Thailand….
From countries more unfamiliar to her, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia…..
and personal histories, sentimental items made by family, outliving the maker, igniting a tactile grief.
She speculated on the hands that had touched them, in the designing, weaving, knitting, printing, embroidering and construction. The packaging, transport, and the delivery. She reflects on both the global and more intimate connections and worries about environmental impact, working conditions and her personal responsibilities.
She muses about wearing each item, prompting herself; she should appreciate them more.
Each morning she selects her outfit and knows it reinforces her identity that day. Some days it’s a bit of a struggle and she makes a poor choice.
So, it being a migraine day, on the bedsheets she draws an assortment of the different women she becomes daily. Over the next few months, she prints and intricately clothes the figures, documenting with the ‘made in’ labels as a personal, miniature, global catalogue of one day in 2021, in the middle of a pandemic, managing a migraine.
The piece is made up of 100 individual cotton scraps of bedsheet which are laid out flat on a board to form a spiral (120x120cm). The full story is told in the attached document which details the inspiration and the process of making. The images were initially scribbled in pencil on my sheets whilst in bed, then transferred to screen and printed as self-portraits, most of which are then embroidered using hand stitch. From 12 basic images I have used multilayering to portray the complexities of identity, so each scrap is an individual portrait as well as being part of a whole.