Looking Beyond the Warp and Weft: Unpicking Latent Narratives in Clothing

Abstract

This article presents my on-going practice in which I explore and reveal perceived memory and experience that is imbued in worn clothing, specifically through my recent work Łódź Blouse Trilogy. In this work, I undertook a series of interventions on blouses in order to reveal dormant and latent matter—details from a single photographic image of a tea party in Poland’s Łódź ghetto.

Łódź Blouse Trilogy and related work addresses the use of textiles, cloth, and clothing as a rich landscape to explore and communicate complex ideas within a fine art context. I also seek to present knowledge and provoke thinking on a series of levels, from craft skills to contemporary scientific and psychological thinking.

We are intimately familiar with the physicality and materiality of clothing. Thus, this work offers a “safe” fluid entry point to discuss and stimulate thinking around inherited memory, biological and metaphorical transference, personal recall and repression, our sense of self and the ability of cloth and clothes to hold and translate human experience.

Fascinated with the creative implications of what is left behind in the clothes we wear, and supported by my experience of working with Alison Fendly at the Forensic Science Service, I have sought to make visible a personal response. The use of garment construction/deconstruction, digital embroidery and dye-sublimation printing have made this work manifest.

Keywords:

• blouse
• memory
• trauma
• trace

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shelly Goldsmith

SHELLY GOLDSMITH

Shelly Goldsmith is a Reader in Textiles at the University for the Creative Arts, Rochester.

She has exhibited at major galleries and museums in Britain, Europe, the USA, and Japan, with work in many notable public collections. Awarded the prestigious Jerwood Prize for Textiles, she was also short-listed for the LICC International Creative Award in 2010.

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