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September 13, 2007
a primer
I was trying to compose a concise statement about my current project to send to somebody, and I thought I would include it here as well:
This project started as a way of questioning the value of the hand work put into textiles for the body and the home in comparison with my "real" work in the studio, and the lack of value that my many efforts in textiles and knitwear design had in the context of my candidacy for a Master of Fine Arts degree. This questioning led me to strive to unify my studio work and my work in fashion by not only wearing my prints (as a uniform, or as a costume) every day, but to allow my handwork to be destroyed, if necessary, by my printmaking, and to document that process of destruction. To this end I am printing on fabrics, sewing clothes from those fabrics, then printing on the clothes, wearing each garment only once before altering it again. When the weather turns colder I will make sweaters, inking them up and printing from them and continuing to wear them; my clothes will become the printing matrix as well as the printing surface. The printmaking inks will not hold up to repeated washings, so the normal wear and tear that clothing endures will lead to the destruction of the printing at the same time that the printing is bringing about the destruction of the clothes.
The following is lifted whole out of the statement of purpose that I included in my grad school application packages nearly three years ago; you can see that while my physical work has gone through a lot of changes in the intervening time, a lot of my concerns are the same:
For me, printmaking is intimately connected to the body, not only because of the sheer physicality involved in making prints: it’s about any sort of impression made with or on the body, from a handprint on a window to the patterns a sweater leaves on a face when one falls asleep with ones head resting on an arm. It is from this starting point that I make my work: I want to draw attention to my body and at the same time have my body leave its mark. I seldom print a straightforward image, preferring to build layers of image upon image to create a sense of history in the work; beneath the surface, bits of shapes and figures can be seen, partially hidden, a mystery that must be unfolded slowly.For as long as I have been making prints I have also been engaged in domestic craft, mainly knitting, sewing and embroidery. For me these processes speak profoundly about the body: textiles are created by human (usually female) hands, to warm and protect the body, and over time the body creates wear on these textiles, so that even in the absence of the body its impression on a piece of clothing or bedding can be seen. I combine domestic textiles with my printmaking in a number of ways: transferring fabrics and knitted pieces onto litho stones to create organic forms which stand in for organs and bones in my figures; tearing apart and sewing back together pieces of prints so that they resemble quilts (but also damaged, mended bodies); printing on bed sheets and on clothing; constructing clothing out of fabrics I have printed on.
When I mentioned construction clothing, I was referring to this piece, part of my final work for my BFA:
At the time I had planned to do more work like this, but never ended up doing so. Later on in grad school I made this dress of printmaking paper sewn onto a muslin base:
and this dress, of Kitakata (a Japanese paper that's thin and crackly):
After that I lost interest in making clothes that weren't wearable; the work felt forced to me.
Posted by jodi at September 13, 2007 04:39 PM | categories: the rules