leather, imitation leather, fake fur, knitting, felt, velvet, zips, concrete, stitch, print
The Others; a self portrait is a series of five stitched sculptures, made as the final piece for my first degree, BA in Drawing and Applied Arts, in 2015. Three of the sculptures are made with imitation leather, two with found leather; three are suspended, two have concrete stands.
The others; a self portrait, 2015,
installed at The Degree Show at The University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, June 2015
(Click for full image)
The focus of this body of work is on individuation, a process which, according to Carl Jung, needs to occur in the second half of life, of finding meaning in life. It is ultimately a preparation for death. Jung talks about balancing our multiple selves with the dark side, or shadow, of ourselves and maintains that failure to acknowledge and accept this shadow can result in fragmentation and associated mental health issues. He also describes the shadow as being the seat of creativity.
The others; a self portrait, 2015
(Click for full image)
Other 1, 2015, imitation leather, fake fur, felted hand knitting, zip, stitch; a hanging sculpure:
The work has developed into a form of self-portrait, a reflective and emotive response to the ongoing excavations of my dark side. I have continued to use cloth and stitch to explore notions of loss and the abject. Using soft, impermanent, skin-like textiles in sculpture, with their associations with craft and the feminine, powerfully subverts traditional representations of the body and evokes its mortality, revealing alternative meanings in its folds and surfaces.
Other 2, 2015, imitation leather, velvet, stitch; a hanging sculpture
Other 3, 2015, imitation leather, industrial felt, flocking, zips, stitch, print; freestanding with a hidden concrete stand
Other 4, used leather, knitting, velvet, zip, stitch, concrete; freestanding
Other 5, used leather, knitting, velvet, zip, stitch; hanging
Individually, the sculptures are aesthetically pleasing yet troubling; as a series they are imposing, an uncanny bodily presence. I feel that I have successfully produced a disturbing tension between repulsion and attraction through the materials and processes I have chosen and by the careful consideration of similarities and contrasts in form, colour and complex surfaces. This creates a disturbing synthesis between visual and tactile experience.
I was awarded the Embroiderers' Guild Scholarship in 2015 and as part of that, I was invited to exhibit The others at The Embroiderers' Guild Graduate Showcase at the Knitting and Stitching Shows later that year, in London (Oct) and Harrogate (Nov.) In the London show, especially, my work received a wide range of conflicting responses, which I thought was wonderful! People often asked me what they were and I replied 'They can be whatever you want them to be'. I like to think there are playful aspects to my work; that many people see genitalia is one, sculpting my aging body as an assortment of oddly quilted, saggy body bags is another! Read my reflections on my use of zips in my blog post, which I wrote in 2016, a year after I made them: Giant genitalia; in defence of the zip, one year on.
The others, installed at The Embroiderers' Guild Graduate Showcase, The knitting and Stitchng Show, London, Oct 2015
(Click for the full image)
Choosing to hang several of the sculptures has increased the sense of the abject and added a spectral quality; considerations of scale, height of hanging and proximity amplify the immersive nature. That the hanging sculptures move randomly without the need for animatronics is a bonus! Ideally, I would like to install a multitude of them in a confined space so that the viewer has to walk amongst them; adding an element of claustrophobia would, I believe, offer a highly disturbing experience in a surreal landscape.
In December 2017 I installed 11 of my soft sculptures at PRILIC exhibition in a semi derelict, former swimming pool, Jacobs Wells Baths, in Bristol. Latterly, it has been a Dance Centre so there is also a wall of mirrors... my soft sculptures became a Multitude!
The others, installed with six of my other sculptures, as Multitude, at PRILIC, Jacobs Wells Baths, Bristol in Dec 2017
(Click for the full image)
Read my blog posts - The Dark Side of Stitch and It's the End of my Embroiderers' Guild Scholar's Year - for more thoughts about this work.