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Cloth & Culture NOW
the artists - Shelly Goldsmith, UK
Meteorology and its global cycles has
played a significant part in my practice, both as a means of
expressing human fragility and the impact imposed upon us. For
twenty years or more I have intimately followed the impact extremes
of weather have had on my parents, who live in the American Mid-Western
State of Ohio.
Their experience of extreme weather systems,
(their home is located in ‘Tornado Alley’) and extreme
shifts in seasonal temperatures has forced them to adopt a radically
different approach to the weather than my own.
I spent time at the Zenia Municipal library in Ohio. Zenia as suffered
the fate of awesome and deadly tornado devastation in its past
and will probably do so again at some point in its future. It is
rebuilt each time and life goes on.
The means of describing, charting and
measuring meteorology in the United States is a very different
one from that with which I grew up with in the UK.
24 hour weather channels and ‘Dew Point’ temperatures
published in the daily newspaper have imposed heightened
weather awareness to most Americans, a mere convenience for planning
their day.
These things have impacted heavily on
my own personal sense of security about my place on the planet
and seeing, hearing and reading about these predictions, facts
and devastations, at some
distance has magnified my anxiety. Weather has become a metaphor
for expressing fear, anxiety and human fragility in my work. The
piece‘No Escape: Reclaimed Dresses from
the Children’s Home of Cincinnati’ and the extended body
of work which resulted, drew upon documentary photography of natural
devastation such as flooding and more latterly domestic US tornado
damage (via documentary imagery supplied courtesy of The Cincinnati
Red Cross). ‘Even before the devastation of the
Boxing Day Tsunami in South East Asia in 2005, Goldsmith was warning
us that not only is water a precious resource, but an untamed force
of nature.’*1
Whilst in Japan, my perception of the
response of Tokyo’s
inhabitants to an earthquake, was quite different from my own tremulous
one. To me this exemplified their reverence for and understanding
of ‘Mother Nature’, a constant companion and presence;
always given great respect for its imprint and impact. These experiences
have strongly challenged my own preconceptions and driven me to
explore issues of global interdependence and sustainability.
Running through my work are connections about what is happening
on our planet and in our bodies. These resonant observations and
comparative studies underpin an ongoing preoccupation with the
essential fluids of our joint states of being; water, blood, rain
etc.
My research into the body has expanded
to encompass an understanding of Eastern medicine as my engagement
with Japan has strengthened.
I have been impressed and humbled by an approach to grieving
the loss of a child in Japan and wonder why we in the West are
culturally unable to allow for such an outlet *2.
Yet conversely, when on occasions, my work has explored issues
of female fertility, gynaecological issues and menstruation there
is an unparalleled degree of privacy from this group of people.
For some time my work has been concerned
with the extremities of the life cycle, the beginning and the end. There is much
contemporary debate concerning when the ‘beginning’ actually
is and long gone is the notion that we begin life at birth. My
work is fed by wide research from observing clinical procedures
such as sonography sessions at the Harris Birthright Centre for
Neonatal Medicine at Kings College Hospital, London. I engage with
nature and geology, recently descending into the bowels of the
Onllwyn Open Face Coal Mine in South Wales to collect samples.
International museums showing collections, such as the Unicorn
Tapestries at the Cluny in Paris and human simulacra in wax at La
Specola in Florence have been inspirational places.
The use of reclaimed garments has been a major element of the
work produced over the last few years. These clothes are often
picked up in charity shops, bid for on e-bay, given by friends
and family or gifted to me.
Some garments have a known provenance, such as the children’s
dresses from the orphanage in Cincinnati. What most of these
garments have experienced is a sort of collective time lapse, having
been often packed up, discarded and shut away until a time when
they are rediscovered, reborn, re-invented.
Clothes are powerful unspoken signifiers of character, of era,
financial status, gender, place and much more. These codes
are easily read by those who live within or are initiated into
these particular cultural parameters. Of course the clothes and
the signifiers mutate and are expressed and viewed with extreme
difference around the world.
The notion that clothing, cloth, can carry memory, a sense of
experience has driven much investigation. I have constructed work
that imagines the external life of the wearer; cloth which bears
the imprint or residue of life. Originally, I utilised dresses
and bonnets intended for girls, but these very gender-specific
garments were not pertinent to all.
However, it was the Christening robe, a non-gendered garment, that
became a natural choice with which to develop these ideas and in
some way encompass us all.
Ultimately, these garments, are very strongly rooted in a domestic,
familial, English and Christian context, which is my experience,
yet, the cultural, ceremonial and historic references. My
intention is that this would become apparent to others who have
grown up within wider cultural parameters.
The dressing and layering of cloth and textiles over many years,
as observed in Japanese Mizuko Jizo Shrines is unique and emotionally
charged evidence of how another culture expresses the power of
clothing, in this case, as a memorial to a life that never was.
This emotive and powerful use of clothing,
on an inanimate object has hugely impacted on my own understanding
of textiles, clothing and life cycles. My engagement with dressmaking,
construction and deconstruction, is long standing. My childhood
activity of making
clothing for my dolls naturally extended into garments for myself
has assisted and underpinned my understanding of working
with textiles as an effective and accessible vehicle for the expression
of ideas.
* 1
Hoggard, Liz, Pear-shaped
stories, Crafts, No.202 September/October 2006,
pg 56-61
*2.
‘Mizuko Jizo shrines are places of remembrance,
for the souls of miscarried, stillborn and aborted children – literally
children who have died in the amniotic fluid.’
Goldsmith, S, Children of the waters Selvedge’ Magazine,
issue 04 Jan/Feb 2005, pg 52-53
UK
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