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.

Originally given as a paper at The Matter of Material conference at Turner Contemporary in 2017, and published within a special edition of Textile: Cloth and Culture, jointly edited between Professor Lesley Millar and Dr Beverly Ayling-Smith.