A former teacher of French and Italian, I came to art, writing and culture jamming later in life with interdisciplinary works that explore globalisation through the intimate or taken-for-granted practices of everyday life. Over the past two years, I have cultivated an art of juxtaposition, a kind of 'zeit-gothic,' producing painstakingly hand-stitched sculptures culled from hundreds of clothing labels for the most part, diverted from destiny as trash.
Emboldened, I made my first short - a 'stitched' film - where the ethos works against the slick, surface, global commodity aesthetic. Culturally embracing the medium of patchwork historically deemed 'unworthy' associated with the domestic and the 'feminine,' with slavery and poverty, the labels, seemingly innocuous yet suffusing our most vulnerable space from cradle to grave, function like collective hallucinations. Most importantly, they attest to several layers of economy underscored by the history of colonisation and the impact of globalisation; to the interaction of all bodies in an unyielding regime of diminished selves, conspicuous consumption, environmental damage and transnational capital.
About the work
Based on an unexhibited artwork, (Disdress: After Fragonard, After Shonibare by Joanna Laromani) and in response to the parliamentary abolition of British and North American slaveries, The Swing of the Lost Abuelitas is a sweatshop sublime of a twist on the theme of the Empire's new clothes as a first-time grandmother sews herself free of the perennial itch that haunts her back with extraordinary but unsettling results.