During the Victorian era in Germany,an ex-seamstress and an inmate in an asylum,Agnes Ricter stitched into virtually every inch of the jacket she created from her institutional uniform.Agnes’s embroidered writing was so profuse that much of the text was hard to disinherited.Prases such as’my jacket’ and ‘my white stockings’however can be seen clearly.The piece of work is deeply personal and also obsessive.
The jacket is part of the Prinzhorn collection at the university in Heidelberg in Germany which holds more than 5,000 works created by patients in psychiatric hospitals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Michael Raedecker(B.1963)
Michael Raedecker is a Dutch artist currently living and working in London.He first trained as a fashion designer studying at the Gerrit Rietreld Academies,Amsterdam and at the Rijksakademie ,Amsterdam before retraining as an artist at Goldsmiths College in London.His background in fashion has obvious influences in his later work as an artist.He combines thread with paint.His paintings often dark and atmospheric ,sometimes hint at the Dutch still life paintings and also subjects such as landscape and subjects such as garlands of flowers.Much of his work has a unsettling uneasy feeling about them.
I find it interesting that his earlier life as a fashion designer does effect his work as an artist and actually fairly obvious that his skills he leaned in fashion were utilised later on in his work.I can also relate to this myself and my early influences as a child growing up with my mother and her work as a tailor , picking up skills from her and gaining an interest in sewing and fashion.This has definitely had an impact on my own work with the materials and techniques used as well as subject matter, and also the biographical side of my work which comes out as part of my visual language of my work.
Ghada Amer(b1963)
Ghada Amer was born in Cairo Egypt and moved to France as a child and them went to live and work in the USA.
I have looked a lot at Ghada Amer in the past as I can relate to her work and connect to her techniques and use of materials ,however this is where the connection ends as her subject matter does not resemble my work.
The strong messages and visual language interests me as does her her own background which contradicts the strict traditional female roles of Islamic culture.
Much of her work is very large canvasses containing images drawn from pornography,she used brightly coloured acrylic paint using mainly primary colours and stitches over them with embroidery leaving the threads seemingly hanging down although this thread is coated in clear resin and stuck down onto the canvas.
The series of work ‘Five Women At work'(1991) is not phonographic images but looks like illustrations and a portrayal of women working at mundane tasks so often seen as traditional female roles such as cooking,cleaning shopping and childcare.The work was a series of four canvasses and not five the fifth was the invisible Amer the maker busily stitching and creating the work.
As well as actually sewing I have also been working on a series of paintings with connections and continued narrative around textiles and autobiography .This piece is a large acrylic on canvas quite textured in places, but I also tried to show a more delicate chiffon fabric of the sleeves.Some of the texture on the cloth is used by stencilling over lace with heavy body paint (a technique I discovered in previous experiments with other work)I then used wax over to add texture and sheen to the canvas.The work is titles little fat dress which is a play on words and a humorous take on the little black dress ,the fashion classic only plus size, taking a critical look at attitudes to women and the feminine ideal.The painting was based on a dress owned my me in my’fatter days’ but I did make the dress larger than it actually was!
I am working on one of my latest projects which is a mixed media piece.It contains a collection of paintings (appliquéd onto a vintage army jacket.The jacket will contain a narrative using words and pictures of the life of my grandfather during World War Two when he served in the Royal Maritime Artillery on the artic convoys.My whole collection of work includes paintings as well as sewn pieces. My work at first glance might not appear to be connected and I am slightly concerned it may seem random, but it is very much connected and is personal to me and my life but I am hoping that they will be interesting and that other people can relate to the work.We are I feel connected to cloth in our daily life. Textiles do tell many human stories.
