Robing Peter to Pay Paul
Goldsmith, Shelly (2008) Robing Peter to Pay Paul. [Installation, Textiles]
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This work builds on my long-term research themes relating to textiles and ecology, especially the mutation of water on our planet (the three states of water). It joins references to clothing as our 'home' (what we live in) with ancient hand weaving techniques in an experimental three-dimensional manner to explore ecological concepts. The piece is presented as an installation, in which thread exists both as woven cloth, and in copious quantities in its non-woven state.
I used traditional hand-woven tapestry techniques (French Gebelin technique) to construct – and I then deconstructed – a child's dress, to examine the flow variants of water around our planet. The work uses the everyday object of clothing as a vehicle to explore and present concepts relating to ecology and hydro-sustainability. The dress is a facsimile, not an actually wearable garment, and the cloth is custom hand-woven, in contrast to the 'meterage' of cloth woven industrially: the notion of 'made by our own hands' is central to the work's concept, reflecting the perception that ecological problems such as global warming are constructed by human beings. The style of the dress is modelled on a simple 1950s day dress, suggesting an innocent time – both through its references to childhood, and to the era it is from.
This work involves a synthesis of traditional and new textile processes presented in a fine art context. It builds on research I have made in previous work, into global flooding and human fragility; it also draws on and makes direct reference to Bachelard's essay Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter.
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