Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks | A game of substitution
Being invited to exhibit my work in JW Anderson’s London store, honour aside, felt strangely compelling. How could my ceramic practice talk to the intriguing garments, already works of art in their own right? Personally, I now can’t bear to stitch as I come from a long line of impoverished seamstresses, outfitters and shop keepers. As a child I sewed and embroidered with my Grandmothers, I also played shops with such gusto that all my belongings had price stickers on. For the many objects out of my short-armed reach I endlessly made papier-mâché objects as stand ins. Like the real-life tortoise I so desperately wanted but could never have, I ensured that it repeatedly emerged in paper dollops and poster paint around the home.
Gazing at the store’s giant modular windows, they are such a perfect arrangement, I do not want to change a thing but rather artfully join in the game. Games remain important to my psychoanalytic practice. Games are the touchstone where fashion and art meet. Humorously taking the real sense of the word substitution, a favourite psychoanalytic manoeuvre, as if by magic my exhibition positions ceramics in place of the expected garments and accessories.
During the making of Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks my forms considered the act of being worn, revealed in the titles, such as I Love this Old Cardigan and Sprung Sleeve. The scale of the swooning shoppers, informed by clay and formed by the figurative vessels, is purposefully not in line with their objects of desire, the shoes and the sacks. All the works have been conceived to sit in harmony with the store’s architecture. In the window they appear to peer out and in turn can be peered at and through. This exhibition’s invite extends to everyone from JW Anderson aficionados to the passer-by.