Facts and Figures
I haven’t been working at the studio these couple of weeks because my schedule has been wildly busy. Although I’ve been working on the things surrounding making artwork e.g., research, recording expenses, talking to people about future exhibitions, and other ad hoc tasks. I wanted to include this in my blog because it’s not mentioned about much anywhere. I suspect it’s because it demystifies the arts and makes it mundane. Is it such a bad thing to make the arts and creative sector relatable to non-art jobs? As it looks like it’s isolated on a summit of Maslow’s hierarchy.
Bags of Clothes
There’s something interesting about the psychology behind the clothes we wear, especially in a group setting. Our clothing choices depend on who we are closest to.
Some of my artworks feature clothes, and a lot of it is associated with laundry (Translucent and Transient, 2018, and Corpse, 2022). I also avidly research what makes people (including myself) tick. Why are we like the way we are?
Readymade
The installations, Corpse (2022) and Wrapped in cotton (2023), are readymade: I put the practical items in an art context and changed its function. There were some interesting points I’ve picked up when watching Duchamp: The Art of the Possible, in Sky Arts. They were talking about his readymade artworks that bring about questions on authorship. It made me reflect on the jeans I’ve used in Corpse, and who made them. I’ve mediated the garment to be an artwork, but the actual credit goes to invisible labour who have sewn the jeans together. (I’ve tried to research who the makers of Top Shop clothes are (e.g., the workers in a factory). But it’s traced to Arcadia Group Ltd, which is a parent company). I first heard about it on the news in 2021.
The Absence of Identity
I think the information on readymade has made the title, Corpse more interesting because the term is a dead body (commenting on the unknown aspects of authorship (in this instance referring to the physical labour), as corpse is an impersonal term to describe someone who has died, rather than referring to the body by the person’s name). On a Kleinian level It’s a part of someone, and not the whole person. But it also made me think about Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ extract in Richard Noble’s Utopias: (Documents of Contemporary Art). They wrote about the different types of labour, that I feel resonate with the different places the pair of jeans has been, and the hands it’s touched before I bought it and made the garment into an artwork.
On a global scale, this absence of identity is even more interesting because I think it’s similar to migration.
