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September 21, 2007
a change
I was talking with Peter the other night about my project, and he brought up necessity as something for me to consider; how does this artificial limitation on what I can wear (and when) relate to the not-so-recent past in which people often had only one or two sets of clothes (and one of those reserved for Sunday)? When you are forced by necessity to wear the same clothes every day, wear and tear becomes evident very quickly, and near-daily maintenance can be required to keep those clothes wearable. I have been feeling that I don't have enough limits in my project, and the days when I wear store-bought t-shirts with the skirts I feel wrong, like I'm not working hard enough, like I'm not getting enough into the spirit of living in my work. I want to see changes happen in the pieces, I want them to grow more quickly into whatever it is they're going to grow into. I want to be an artist walking around forced to think about my work every moment of every day, because I can smell the ink on me or because I can feel the stiffness of the ink buildup on my dress (or my sweater). I don't want to be just someone walking around wearing weird clothes, because this project isn't really about that.
So from now on I'm not going to be wearing the eight skirts or two tops that I made any more, although I will hang on to them in case of an emergency in which I don't have anything else ready to wear (if I can properly establish a working routine and stick to it, this shouldn't happen). I currently have six dresses. I will add two more to bring that number to eight. This will allow me one week's worth of things to wear, plus an extra to wear on "wash day". Once a week, I will launder seven of the dresses. Once a week, I will print on or otherwise alter seven of the dresses. And once a week I will choose one dress that I consider "finished", setting it aside and not wearing it again; I will make a new dress to fill the place in the cycle of each retired dress. By doing this I will be able to gather a number of works for exhibit later on, while the limited number of pieces in the wearing cycle will allow for each piece to be printed and altered more often. I will continue to limit myself to variations on the same basic dress shape, for uniformity.
As for sweaters: I will be making a series of pullovers (again, of a uniform design) that I will print from and wear with the dresses. I will also allow myself to wear a limited number of cardigans and boleros with the dresses, but these must also be made by me. These I won't print on or with, mostly because I'm only interesting in using a single, recognizable sweater shape in the prints I'll be making.
Until now, this blog has focused solely on the wardrobe project; I haven't given up on my other work, printmaking on paper meant for the wall, and indeed this work will feed off of and into the wardrobe project a good deal. At the same time that I print the dresses, I have been working on a new series of large scale prints, using the same inks and the same woodblocks, allowing the dents and bumps left by the clothes in the surface of the wood to appear in subsequent prints on paper. This summer I bought several sheets of 36" by 78" Tokuatsu (a strong, machine-made kozo paper) at the Japanese Paper Place warehouse in Toronto, and these will form the wall component of my work for the thesis exhibition next spring. The prints will evolve slowly, beginning with folding and re-folding the paper sheets and printing layer upon layer of transparent colour from uncut blocks of wood, building up complex and varied colour fields. I have no preconcieved idea of what these prints will end up looking like; what's important to me is that they serve as maps or keys to what's going on in the wardrobe work, and that they convey a sense of that layering of marks and the layering of time, the damage inflicted on the clothes in wearing and in printing, and the damage inflicted in turn on the printing matrix (and the body) by the clothes. The action of folding the paper in many places, combined with the subsequent buildup of ink layers, will make the paper feel like well-worn-in cloth.
Here are two of the new prints in progress, each with three layers of ink:
And a detail:
Posted by jodi at September 21, 2007 08:58 PM | categories: prints : the rules
Comments
Are you using your own designs for the skirts and dresses? (Apologies if you covered this earlier and I missed it.)
Posted by: Janice in GA at September 21, 2007 10:44 PM
I'm looking forward to seeing what the 'finished' dresses will look like as I remember you mentioning that you had a hard time calling things done. I think it's a great idea using the same dress style, in my opinion it really brings the whole project together and will draw attention to the printing rather than the different garment styles (hopefully that's what you're after!). I'm really enjoying reading about your work!
Posted by: Anna at September 22, 2007 04:51 AM
I am also really enjoying reading about your project including your thinking and re-thinking of the rules. Pulling dresses out of the group every week seems like a good idea because it will allow you to focus on product a little and also I imagine that part of what you enjoy is making the dresses and this way you get to do that all throughout the project. It will also be interesting to see what rules or criteria you will have for which one is finished in a particular week. Will it be difficult and will you actually stop altering it at that point or just stop printing on it? I also agree that it is good to have less variety in the garments so that the idea of the surface transformation is clearer. I love with working rules in my work (sometimes fairly arbitrary ones) and I have enjoyed following your thinking of what rules you want to use to make your idea and what you want to communicate clearer. While I am good a finding rules I like I often forget what they are in service to. You know what I mean?
It is also exciting to see the changes in your garments.
Posted by: miss mildred at September 23, 2007 06:58 PM