Emotional objects: things overloaded with feeling

Clothes are amongst our most emotional objects- sites where multiple feelings may be produced, performed and contained. Though the capacity to contain and induce emotion is a common to all material things, those we associate with garments are often particularly potent. This exhibition explores clothing’s emotional affects through two everyday objects: the handkerchief and the glove. They are emotional objects, artefacts which convey, stand-in for and embody emotion. These artefacts, mundane, yet overdetermined, are bound up with the etiquette and traditions of courting and mourning, of private and public, of work and of war. They are souvenirs, love tokens, and mementoes: deeply entangled with performances of love, labour and grief. Despite their ritualized and socially proscribed modes of use gloves and handkerchiefs are also deeply personal and tactile objects, often understood as indivisible from those who used them. They are bodily objects, objects that stand in for and act upon us in lieu of absent bodies.

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