Nicola Grellier 17040406Research For Practice

Unpicking Clothing: how does a process of deconstruction and reconstruction engender new ways of thinking and knowing?

With the intention of removing narrative from the representational in my practice I began a process of unpicking and deconstructing items of clothing either kept and treasured or practical and in use. This essay looks at what happens when these items, which have had a life of wear or use, become altered when abstracted from the body and reconfigured as subject (Felshin 1995). I will ask what clothing means practically and symbolically and examine how deconstruction can lead to new ways of evaluating and understanding practice, whether the dismantling is as important as the making and if making collage can produce new ways of thinking and knowing.

In this research for practice essay I will describe and interpret what I have previously engaged in as a spontaneous process within my wider practice. I am using worn clothing to signify ideas about presentation and display, inner and outer skin, memory in material, and the fugitive nature of time. I will examine deconstruction, touch, and the perception of ‘female making’ which may be considered inherent within notions about cloth and clothing. I have previously used found objects, paper and textile materials in collage and photomontage as a method and process towards intuitive action and away from deliberate planning. Deconstructing as a valid and commensurate activity is new to my work and serves to consolidate ideas about making and investigations into aspects of scale, memory and intuitive knowledge gained through manual activity.

Using theory for practice and reflexive and critical reading methodologies I aim to determine where I align with artists who use clothing and cloth in various ways to comment on universal experience and female making skills. I will look at installations by Korean-American artist Jean Shin and conversation between Ann Hamilton and Amei Wallach of the Smithsonian Institute about Hamilton’s ideas of embodied knowledge and use of materials to create thought beyond text or language. I have never truly formed coherent understanding of my work and I consider the challenge of gathering and collating information and thoughts in this essay to be an extended part of the collage process enabling me to come to more disciplined research and understanding of my methods.

Grellier , N. (2017) Fabrication Sum (collage fabric, paper, board,) Available from nicolagrellier.co.uk

CONSTRUCTIVE DECONSTRUCTION

Collage, evolving from roots of decollage, through photomontage and assemblage, was laid claim to by a “succession of revolutionary art movements” throughout the 20th century (Raaberg , 1998, p.153). Having been appropriated by Picasso and Braque it was adopted by Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists who conceived it as a method for subverting prevailing traditions in Western art (Raaberg , 1998). However successful anarchistic methods of collage were in predominantly patriarchal practices, collage using found objects, which were often of familiar or domestic origin would be claimed by feminist artists of the late 1960’s and 1970’s who were affirming their status through art made about and of their lives and lived experience. There is a direct lineage from ‘women’s work’ and making skills, collecting and communal making practices to feminist collage, assemblage, installation and performance. The principle of fragmentation and re-appropriation implies a political strategy which may be intrinsic and immutable but which can coincide with abstract visual concepts about form, colour, accident and intuition.

Choosing which piece of clothing to deconstruct begins a process of alteration. Unpicking takes time: there are often many parts to a piece of clothing. My painting trousers consisted of 26 pieces. Taking them apart was slow and very meditative. I experienced feelings of sadness and stupidity as they were the first piece of my clothing that I chose to unpick and I wasn’t sure why I was doing it. They had been with me for so long, to begin with it seemed to be a destructive and aimless act; I could not predict how it would affect my continuing work as it also felt compelling, addictive and somehow positive. This was an archival action, a way of acknowledging the relentless passing of time and an attempt to secure fallible, incomplete and elusive memories. The failing of memory, false memory of childhood, constructed untruths and the dementia of family members, and fear of its loss, are all symbolized with this fragmentation of parts and the investment of time in making. The disassembled trousers are the first in this series of human scale collages. Fragments of pattern cutting templates in reverse, messy, uneven, imbued with identity. The piece is awkward and unsuccessful but enabled the possibility of continuing this undoing. It is called Fabrication Sum referring to myself as physical maker and creator of fictions, sum as the addition of separate parts to make a whole and sum ‘I am’. Time taken to unpick was strange and interesting and acted in direct contrast to the speed of remaking in collage.

MEANING IN CLOTHING

Clothing, the ubiquitous performance of covering the human body, has varied connotations and uses. It is consumer product, fashion item, basic comfort, displayer and disguiser of identity and political weapon used both on and by individuals and global communities. It can be consumed briefly, be part of a hoarded mess or archived carefully. My interest is in ideas about time and memory imbued both physically and metaphorically within items of clothing and how the choosing and action of taking apart certain pieces of clothing can produce new ways of thinking and new constructions using collage methods which can produce significant propulsion towards creativity. It is an attempt to control what is elusive and unalterable. Attention to the passing of time may heighten feelings of nostalgia, wistfulness, panic, and loss. Arrival at this critical period is strangely shocking and has caused me to acknowledge and act on the urge to halt, repair, reverse or recapture what I think I remember. Unpicking stitch by stitch is therefore an intentional, meditative process. It reveals: holes, rips, creases, edges, faded colour and marks of mending done by other hands. I am interested in the motivation to undo and remake as part of a practice which allows humans to recognize, whether consciously or not, their part in a communal will to (re)create. Pajaczkowska cites Melanie Klein (no date) writing about the British post-war campaign to ‘Make Do and Mend’ in which she suggests “reparation… is the universal human response to knowledge of our capacity for destructiveness, and is the basis of art and culture.” (Pajaczkowska , 2005 , p.240.) She says, particularly in wartime, that we have a cultural as much as a practical need to repair and re-use and sees deconstruction as a driving force for creativity. Constant use of wearing, washing, mending, ironing, folding that is evident particularly within older materials such as linen, cotton, silk and wool and all the attendant marks offer a direct connection with the wearer.

Symbolic memory occupies these marks, which are revealed clearly when the parts are separated. I see the marks of use, seams and creases as metaphors for the joints and veins of the body, the holes of orifices or scars, the tracks of repetitive holes where stitches have been undone form lines of repetition and repertoire, the cloth itself is clothing or skin.

Looking at what are culturally and practically considered to be female practices of making and mending, and the emergence of collage, I can situate my work within a broad area of ‘Femmage’, the term created by artist and educator Miriam Schapiro and artist writer Melissa Meyer (Meyer et al. 1978), radical feminists whose work reflected women’s lives and lived experience. Their writing examined why so many female artists made collage. Femmage refers to sewing and cut paper skills and the collecting and using of found or kept materials made for and with an “audience of intimates” (Meyer et al., 1978 , p.86). It describes global traditions of communal inter-generational making and storytelling which are bound by the fact that women would not only save and re-use materials and papers, but would have had little or no access to formal art materials, and were historically rarely able to gain status within the fine art hierarchy. Femmage consolidated the idea of power within these practices. My mother handed down her skills to daughters and granddaughters in the same way and I have been part of, and witnessed, this strong female urge to create through my female familial relationships. As an artist working in solitary practice, this communal and sometimes collaborative way of creating is not part of my habit but I can consider my work is situated within these principals of female making.

I am both interested in, and suspicious of nostalgia. Romanticizing the past, whether personally or in concepts around the inheritance of ‘women’s work’ lies in awkward proximity to where skills and oppression collide in sweatshops, hardship and home, both historically and still globally. The difficulties of multiple roles and responsibilities lie heavily on women’s shoulders. Being a female artist in a time where technology plays many and varied roles across every area of life and work and has undoubtedly improved much of these hardships in western women’s lives, I am in a position to use my inheritance of skills and knowledge to enrich the way that I approach making. I am aware that I may inherit cognitive dysfunction as a genetic recurrence in my family and see collage and clothing as a way of consolidating fragments of autobiography in my practice. It is also an attempt to embody identities and establish an internal language and ‘knowingness’.

MAKING KNOWLEDGE

Ann Hamilton makes installations on a monumental scale using textiles, text, touch, sound and voices and describes labouring with ones hands as “redemptive…when my hands are busy, then my mind can wander and I’m extremely happy and content, and very present. Labor with materials can be a way of being present”. (Wallach , 2008, p.74) Describing how her practice evolved from studying textiles and an interest in “the way the body through physical labor leaves a transparent physical presence in material and how labor

is a way of knowing”, (Wallach , 2008 , p.74), Hamilton uses a process analogous to collage, allowing thoughts and meanings to arrive during the making, even when the installations are enormous, dependent on many collaborators, situated in huge spaces and requiring much practical planning. Despite the scale of much of her output she works without preconceptions or fixed ideas of outcome, allowing her audience to arrive at their own feelings in a visceral way; the experience is intended to provoke a uniquely personal internal dialogue. Meaning is arrived at through touch, smell, sight, sound and instinct – it is embodied within the experience. Hamilton has transposed her interest in the metaphors of cloth where the process is the audience’s interaction with the installation as much as in her making. It is a form of ‘listening without expectation’ (Wallach , 2008 , p.59) so that all forms of viewing are part of listening or knowing. Hamilton’s monumental and complex installation habitus made in 2016, involves the audience in multiple sensory actions producing the possibility of ranges of emotions in the individual. In part of the installation visitors can set in motion giant spinning curtains, like huge voluminous skirts, and experience sight, sound and the touch of moving air by standing inside the billowing fabric in enveloping immersion. Hamilton repeatedly makes work using and altering materials and objects that are universally familiar, giving her audience experiences by which they can form their thoughts and feelings without prescription in order that they can name, and therefore ‘know’, the experience themselves. “I am not interested in it being a purely sensory experience… when we experience it, we are trying to figure out how to name it. We are born into bodies, and as bodies we inherit the ability to language our experiences. How that happens is in part the subject of my work.” (Wallach , 2008 , p.58) Her method of working seeks to generate embodied experience, chance thoughts, and interior language. Reading about her work and ideas has broadened my ideas about scale pertaining to the body and how a person experiences and expands in spaces. Hamilton’s approach to fluid outcomes and bodily knowing and language is potent and provoking.

Hamilton, A. (2016) habitus Installation (curtains, pulleys, performance of spinning wool and cutting sweaters, projection and text) at Municipal Pier 9 in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Available from : artblog.org (accessed 19 April 2018)

CONNECTING THREADS

Jean Shin collects and transforms mundane objects using labour-intensive processes of deconstruction and remaking to effect visual transformations on both a human and architectural scale. Using a collaborative process to memorialize and affirm the connections between groups of people, her installation Unraveling 2006-09 toured and was remade in six cities. Shin used multiple sweaters donated by members of the Asian American art world to map their dense social network. By unraveling these sweaters and reassembling the yarns to form a network of threads and by naming the participant with a silkscreen label sewn onto the edge of the remaining part of the sweater, she makes a complex literal and symbolic connection which mirrors social and technologically connected networks. Each donor has listed all their known connections amongst the other donors and there follows a complicated installation process where some of the ‘people’ (sweaters) are connected to upwards of 80 other sweaters and are likewise connected to by those 80 others. The connections are relived through the installation exercise. It symbolizes a city of communication and the personal and global identity of displaced peoples. The sweaters which are most connected are the most unraveled, having symbolically given away much of themselves by engaging in such a wide network. (Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2009 )

Shin, J. (2006 – 09) Unraveling (yarn from sweaters, silkscreen labels) Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington (2009) Available jeanshin.com (accessed 17 April 2018)

This is a process of action and response, a communal deconstruction and remaking which takes objects that are intimately connected to an individual, amassing and organizing the singular and highly personal (imbued with all the stains, smells, signs of wear and use) into an abstracted, in some ways performed, assemblage which makes sense as a whole.

I am making an installation by unraveling and rewinding sweaters of my family’s and acquaintances and my own, having requested donations verbally and on Instagram. They are irritating to unpick and the process of winding is methodical and physical in a small way, thus far done only in the evening at home, attaching to a time of making which could be considered ‘down time’ for therapeutic making. Each one is a self-contained reversal of the knitting action originally performed in their making; returning each to a single ball, separated from the other individuals and characterized by colour and size. The child’s chair causes alterations in the perception of scale and stands in as a substitute human presence, a recurring motif in my practice.

Grellier, N. (2018) (wool, chair) w.i.p

Jean Shin has repeatedly used clothing as subject in her installations. Cut Outs and Suspended Seams 2004 is a collage of deconstructed items of clothing donated by MOMA museum employees. In her own words“In its fragmentation of the garments—and by proxy, the body—the piece visually breaks down the museum’s hierarchical structure, as the shirt of a janitor occupies the same space as that of the museum’s director” (jeanshin.com (no date)). The fragmentation of parts, dismantling seams and zips, reorganization to give equal status to individuals, how they choose to present themselves and what they choose to donate creates a democracy within an inevitably hierarchical work environment. The clothing pieces are both separate abstract entities and pieces bound together in a larger whole.

Shin, J. (2004) Cut Outs and Suspended Seams (cut fabric, thread and starch) Projects 81. Museum of Modern Art New York. Available jeanshin.com (Accessed 19 April 2018)

THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

I selected a silk shirt that I had bought in a market in Florence when I was eighteen. It has a complex and beautiful black and white pattern and I found that I could never part with this shirt despite its awkward shape meaning that I seldom wore it. The place and time that I bought it had particular meaning for me. I began to unpick the shirt. I photographed the separate pieces and enlarged them as screen prints. I embarked on a lengthy process of a stitched version of the magnified back section, as well as making screen prints of the different parts of the shirt on old pieces of saved linen and cotton. In parallel I started to deconstruct one of several old room screens onto which I will construct a new extended flattened and altered Florentine shirt. The room screen presents a paradox of revealing, hiding, suggestion, fantasy, the intimate and mundane. Deconstructing the panels reveals innards of hidden fabrics and inner screens of faded paper, sometimes with chalked instructions or gum stripped joins, several panels which could be separated or rejoined as floor or wall canvases, these screens represent the hidden body, repression, sexuality, storage, decoration, personal histories, femaleness, femininity and domesticity and reveal successful or abandoned attempts at re-upholstery. The scale and dimensions mimic the body and refer to canvas as art support and the durability of linen and its archival integrity.

By removing the body from the installation or collage, making clothing the subject, one can address the representation of bodies, primarily the female body, in western art history and the patriarchal discourse. Laura Mulvey’s ‘classic

statement on gendered looking’ (Felshin , 1995 , p.8) refers to the disunion of active and passive or male and female image construction. Absenting the body, removing female subject, confers control over concepts around identity, sexuality and representation. Absence of body in these assemblages and collages refers also to loss of cognitive function, false memory, ageing and the act of physically memorializing and the presence and symbolism of cloth from swaddling to shroud.

Grellier, N. (2018) screen.

Hamilton, A. (1988 / 1991) (still life) (white shirts, gold leaf, wood table, chair) The Carol and Arthur Goldberg Collection, reinstalled (2015) WHITE at MOCA Jacksonville Florida. Available annhamiltonstudio.com

The simple materials and the action of folding and stacking, repetition and memorializing, is clearly found within an early work of Ann Hamilton’s which uses clothing as subject :(still life) originally installed in a private home as part of the Home Show project in Santa Barbara in 1988 and reinstalled and exhibited in 2015. Describing “domesticity’s dual nature” the shirts were “transformed by processes of destruction and care” (Hamilton, A., annhamiltonstudio.com). Hamilton depicts ideas of absence and presence with the use of familiar materials: “Tables are my blank paper, my landscape, my figure, a plane that implies the solitary figure and all that is social . . . two people sitting face-to-face, working together, eating or speaking. . . . All tables inherit a history of their use as a site of communion and sacrifice.” (Hamilton, A. annhamiltonstudio.com)

EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE

Ann Hamilton’s work consistently interrogates the relationship between bodily experience and internal language or knowledge. She asks ‘how our bodies know things and how we embody our knowledge through actions and touch….in primary experiences’ (Wallach , 2008 , p.54). She questions how we communicate, verbally, visually, aurally and whether we can know something if there is no language to describe it or understand an experience and give it value if we cannot name it (Wallach , 2008 , p.54). Her work covers a broad range of practice and materials, but is always immersed in physical sensation and the action of making as an intimate (for herself and her audience) process, which engages all the senses so that the experience is felt throughout the body. All senses are equal, the experience of being inside and part of her installations means the ‘viewer’ becomes involved and is a part of what they experience. She sees this taking part and not knowing as an ‘active, productive, intelligent space…an act of attention’ (Wallach , 2008 , p.57) which engenders the possibility of knowledge. In discussion with Amei Wallach about her installation mattering 1997-98, Hamilton talks about just having an ‘anchor to allow me to not know a lot of other things for a long time…the more open the process can be to not being set allows me time to trust my intuition about certain things. The need to know, or the need for work to be something, has to be suspended’ (Wallach , 2008 , p.60). She describes at length a huge project in Lyon which involves removing walls to make a massive space which contains a single (stitched together) piece of orange silk which almost fills the perimeter of the space. The silk, which refers to the silk industry in Lyon, was tethered half way up the wall at one end and the other end was raised and lowered by a system of cables over it’s width. It would catch the air and undulate. There were five peacocks living below it, a person sitting at the top of a telephone pole above the silk surface, a spool of inked

typewriter ribbon, which the person would weave in and out of their fingers until it took up the whole hand, was then removed, holding the form of the hand, and dropped to the bottom of the pole onto a pile of similar ‘hands’ around which the peacocks ‘tended to gather’ (Wallach , 2008 , p.61). All sorts of differing sensations could be experienced in different areas of the installation. Hamilton is wary of attaching prescribed meaning to the piece. It is ‘about’ language, making and marks but much of its inception was intuitive and impulsive.

Hamilton , A. (1997-98) mattering (orange silk, live peacocks, utility pole, six wall-mounted perches, attendant, porcelain inkpot, inked typewriter ribbon, sound) At Musee d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France. Available from : annhamiltonstudio.com (Accessed 20 April 2018)

CONCLUSION

Ann Hamilton speaks about the uncertainty and exhilaration of not knowing, of being physically (where she was living in 2008) out of the mainstream art world. She talks about how we are in a continuous process of transition and how one must allow this un-tethering in order to discover what you don’t know: “you have to make yourself uncomfortable in order to grow” (Wallach, A. 2008 p.77)In researching this essay I began by looking at early feminist artists who used clothing as subject, using materials that were familiar in their everyday lives,

frequently using domestic and, arguably, female practices to make art which pushed ideas about their status in the Western art hierarchy (Harris 1997). I am interested in current use of commonplace objects, in particular clothing, in art practices, how they are collected and what happens to them when they are disrupted, reorganized or altered but retain associations with their primary meanings where these meanings are intensified by the action of undoing and subsequent making. Deconstruction as an act or performance and consequent separating out of component parts directs attention to multiple associations and connections of thoughts and ideas. Having used ‘craft’ processes continuously in parallel with traditional art materials and methods, namely painting and drawing, I wanted to consider how collage and assemblage methods, both materially and conceptually, could enable me to strengthen the relationships between all areas of production. By giving equal weight to multiple approaches and using materials that are ‘real’, I have gained understanding about how to assimilate knowledge that comes about through receptive, unplanned making.

Examining the work of Ann Hamilton and Jean Shin has provided me with significant insight into ideas about the empty dress as concept. Removing the body from my work has given me a cogent alteration of focus, changing the subject from representational into conceptual ideas about identity. I have looked at my specific interests in time and memory and how actions undertaken, whether using stitch as a valid part of the process, or re-using and altering an element such as pattern can communicate theory beyond obvious connotations when located as aggregate components of my practice.

Grellier, N. (2018) unreconstructed man w.i.p. (Linen, paper, board, collage)

word count 4052REFERENCES

Felshin, N. (1993) Empty Dress : Clothing as Surrogate in Recent Art . Independent Curators Incorporated, New York.

Felshin, N. (1995) Clothing as Subject Art Journal 54 (1), pp 20-29.

Hamilton, A. (2012) The event of a thread Artist’s Statement. annhamiltonstudio.com Accessed on 16 April 2018

Hamilton, A., (2015) (still life) annhamiltonstudio.com Accessed on 16 April 2018

Harris, J., (1998) Clothing Art Mimi Smith and the fabric of Time PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 20 (3) Accessed 24 February 2018

Hutchins, L. Ann Hamilton: The Common S E N S E Textile Vol 13 No 3 pp300-305 (2016)

Jeffries, J. (2007) Laboured Cloth The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth and Cultural Production pp 283 – 294 The MIT Press.

Kirsch, A. (24/09/2016) Between Text and Textile – Ann Hamilton’s “habitus” Artblog www.theartblog.org Accessed on 16 April 2018

Meyer, M. and Schapiro, M., (1978) Waste Not Want Not ; An Inquiry into what Women Saved and Assembled : FEMMAGE. Heresies: Women’s Traditional Arts: The Politics of Aesthetics 1 (4) pp 66-70

Pajaczkowska, C. (2005) On Stuff and Nonsense: The Complexity of Cloth Textile 3 (3) pp 220-249.

Raaberg, G. (1998) Beyond Fragmentation: Collage as feminist strategy in the arts. Mosaic : A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 31 (3) pp 153-171

Respini, E. (2004) Projects 81 : Jean Shin The Museum of Modern Art. Available from moma.org. Accessed 18 April 2018.

Wallach, A. (2008) A Conversation with Ann Hamilton in Ohio American Art 22 (1), pp 52-77.

Smithsonian American art Museum (2009) Jean Shin on her exhibition Common Threads Available from youtube.com Accessed 18 April 2018

FURTHER READING

Earle, S., (2011) Mimi Smith Fashioning Art and Life Women’s Art Journal 32 (1) pp 13-21

Entwistle, J. and Wilson, E., (2001) Body Dressing Oxford/New York : Berg.

Felshin, N. (1995) Women’s Work A Lineage, 1966 – 94 Art Journal 54 (1), pp 71-85

Hemmings, J., (2002-3) Tracey Emin : Stitching Up The Extreme Craft Arts International 56 pp 72-75

Mitchell, V., (2011) Textiles : Art and the Social Fabric Textile 9 (2) pp 230-238

Olding, S., (2014) Cloth & Memory 2 Textile 12 (2) pp 234-239

Vaughan, K., (2005) Pieced Together : Collage as an artists’s method for interdisciplinary research International Journal of Qualitative Methods 4 (1) pp 27-52