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RMIT Design Hub, June, 2022
The exhibition Reimagining (P)lace marks the completion of my PhD from the School of Fashion & Textiles at RMIT. The research presents a final installation, Stitches in the Air, a collaboration with animation artist Damian Gascoigne together with a suit of new works that emerged through this process. This study contributes to new relationships between contemporary textile practice and place as it transforms how we understand, experience, and learn through making.
This work includes a suite of paper waste lace works that contemplate the transience and impermanence of our times. In these works stitching becomes a form of drawing, exploring subtle configurations of space and place that seek location amidst a world in an increasing state of flux.
As nuanced meditations, they explore (p)lace marking in new ways by giving agency to materials that go unnoticed in our daily lives. Discarded shredded administration paper of disrupted text, numbers and colour-coded excel spreadsheets was painstakingly stitched into a new narrative. The material transformation from waste to lace gives form to the intangible human relationships that make the systems of a workplace.
These quietly subversive works took inspiration from Invisible Cities by writer Italo Calvino whose citizens wove coloured threads between valleys and mountains. Once the threads were too dense to pass through, they were abandoned, leaving a scaffolding of suspended lace as a gentle reminder of our collective impermanence and fragility.