INTRODUCTION

This paper is a journey through a making process. The initial concepts were concerned with the semiotics of garments and the changing notion of identity in contemporary culture. A second hand white shirt was my starting point, which in turn led me to purchasing a new white shirt. These two objects were responsible for an investigation that examined the process of my own making and that of others. Questions pertaining to production and reproduction also began to surface. This led to the consideration of the value of labour in its different forms and the changing nature of making within a contemporary practice. After unpicking, reconstructing, reproducing within the studio with needle, thread and scissors, with camera as a documenting tool key questions emerged: Does being a hand maker inhibit practice. This expanded into: What is it that constitutes something being classed as hand made? To finally: What is a person minute? These were explored throughout my Masters Degree that I completed in September 2003. The installation and paper 14 Person Minutes was offered as a current outcome to these questions. Within the making of this installation the notion of a hybrid practice was presented. A practice that crosses different taxonomies and at its core is multi-disciplinary. Which for me was the continual amalgamation of technology, the computer and the video camera, and traditional skills such as hand sewing. I see these different prosthetics as a range of tools for my practice and I challenged the perceived value of them within contemporary making and acknowledge the value of low tech skills and their use in the applications of the high tech. Expanding from my own working practices was the idea of a collaboration with Graham Mack 3d animator. Translating stitched studio work into a 3d animation was not only an exploration of an idea that clothing is described as architecture of the body but also the differing and comparable working methods and the notion that repetition is at the basis of both forms of making. The research methodology was one of theory directed and influenced by practice.

WHITE SHIRT – WHITE COLLAR

Through theoretical and practical investigations the ordinariness of the white shirt became transformed into extraordinariness. Crossing boundaries of art, textiles, sculptures and architecture. The unpicking, documenting and subverting of this garment separated the construction into components. The most interesting to me was the collar. The collar a curious contraption, which encloses the neck, confines the body and supports the tie. It appears to me to have a restricting quality. It separates the head from the body, the mind from the body. This affects the process of making, for the machine-hand operation requires a body-mind connection. Its colour and identity carry semiotic messages responsible for the cultural division of labour between the blue collar and white collar workers. Being an ordinary and everyday item, it operates a dualistic position in society, accessible to everyone to purchase and own. It offers a depersonalised uniform, to those who choose or are required to wear it. This depersonalisation is carried forward in the second hand shirt hanging on the rail in the Salvation Army shop. It belongs to no body; the body is absent both in terms of the wearer but also the worker. No trace of the maker is present. This manual labourer is what? A maker, an assembler, a processor?  The white collar is distinct from the shirt of the blue-collar worker and operates at the upper level of the socio-economic structure ‘engaged in clerical or administration rather than manual work’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary 1995 a). White also has political power and status, Governments issue white papers, unpleasant truths can be whitewashed and the president of the United States of America operates from the White House. The second hand shirt led me to the new supermarket shirt, costing almost the same as the second hand shirt, it is displayed within polythene, implying that it has been untouched and that when you buy it, you will be the first person to have a bodily contact with it. Obviously it has been cut, stitched and processed by many hands. It is these hands the packaging and marketing attempts to remove. By unpicking the shirt, I began to decipher the different elements involved in its production, the production of raw materials, the production of the cloth, the assembling of component pieces into a formed garment. It is this assembling process that related to my own studio making.