Honours Exegesis Abstract

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This project contains an exegesis and a creative body of work ­– an exhibition of garments, neo-tapestries, and a Creative Process Journal. This creative research asks: how can garments and neo-tapestries explore the embodied narrative in ancestral textiles? In this project, I weave theories of embodied, worn culture from relevant theoretical fields to explore the narratives in ancestral lace cloth. I use textiles to contextualise these theories as I situate this research in the thematic area of Fashion Studies. I examine the importance of the body and its connection to cloth when extracting narratives about its lived experience and assess significant information derived from material objects where the observer shares a personal connection with the object.

 

I engage with the lived experience of the laces through orally relayed ancestral narratives and the material structure of the cloth. While I do not make lace, I use print and machine embroidery to ‘recreate’ the historical textiles, exploring the layering of history and experience embedded in the objects through a layering of process and intervention. For this, I combine theories presented by Dr Ellen Sampson (2021) and Dr Hilary Davidson (2019) to explore the worn historic dress through recreation processes. I build on practice-based researchers Dr Claire Humphries (2014) and Kelly Kolamtatsos’ (2021) print-based exploration of ancestry through intergenerational objects. Through an in-depth discussion of my practice-based methodology, links emerge between tactile, analogue, and sustainable production methods and theories from adjacent fields.