Rachel Quimerez

Rachel Quimerez

Inverno Collection 2013

Rachel Guimerez is a Brazilian Fashion Designer, specialising in knitted garments. For her latest collection, ‘Inverno’, she is using solely recycled materials. 

‘In the point of view of the planet, throwing waste away isn’t possible, because nothing will leave here, until the day NASA provides us with a rocket... We decided not to buy anything else when we realised that we had it all’, [Rachel Guimerez, 2013]

She saved ‘anything that is left over’ from her production line from the last eight collections and four years of work. This amounted to ‘almost one ton of wool, cotton, silk, polyamide and acrylic, and all types of fibres’. 500g of one of these materials is what is necessary to make one piece. Instead, they had bundles of 300g, 200g, and even less. Her and her team needed to ‘separate colours, divide textures, put the tones together and start’. This means that each piece has to be individually designed and is completely unique. ‘This is a reasonable and creative way to use resources’

What Guimerez is doing would not have been out of place 100 years ago. Sewers would use every scrap of their clothes making materials. Any amounts of material too small to form part of a new garment would be used to patch or mend. In the modern age clothes aren’t made, they’re bought from shops and so the consumer has no control over the wastage of the garment they’re buying. This means they wont have a matched piece of material to patch a jumper if they make a hole. Taking it to a seamstress and paying for the repairs or alteration would normally cost more than buying a new jumper, and so logically it makes sense to bin the old and buy the new.

The continuous wastage we now face as a world is why designers like Guimerez are so important in the development of fashion. In this money motivated continent, designers like Guimerez get people excited about craft and making things for free. 

Flor de Lotus 

One way of cutting down environmentally unfriendly out-sourcing is to find a more financially viable production plan within the country. Although seemingly improbable, Rachel Guimerez found a solution. And ‘so with this will of creating fashion that goes beyond tendencies, beyond disposability, that brings cultural and emotional elements, ‘Doiselles’ developed the ‘Flor de Lotus’ project’ [Guimerez, 2012]. The project involved Guimerez training 18 prisoners at Brazils’ ‘Arisvaldo de Campos Pires’ maximum security prison. She’d teach them intricate knitting and crochet techniques to produce garments sold under her clothing brand Doiselles.

The initiative ‘is a chance for prisoners to earn money while serving time’. In addition, for every three days worked, one day is taken off the workers release date. Initially to some, the thought of wearing a garment hand crafted by a murderer may spur repulsion, but there are massive benefits to the scheme. ‘The project gives prisoners confidence, and skills they can use in the outside world... the project boosts prisoners’ chances of finding a job when their sentences are up’ [Celio Tavares, former prison inmate]. Most of the prisoners at the jail have ‘spent more time in than out’ [Celio Tavares], finding no escape from the cycle of crime. Giving the prisoners skills, savings and job potential, significantly deters them from returning to a life of crime that was awaiting them before. They are now ‘capable of changing their lives, as soon as they conquer their freedom’, [Andrea Andries, 2012]

In less developed countries in which production is often relocated to, employees are ‘frequently paid by the piece’ and homework that’s given to employees is ‘difficult to monitor’. This results in rushed work and a bad quality outcome. The alternative, are garments that are quality checked, from prisoners that are paid per day. If a customer doesn’t support the cause, they must surely still support that the cause takes trade away from factories that ‘frequently involves child labour’. 

The project of course, is on a small scale and relies on compliant and enthusiastic volunteers. It doesn’t offer a full term solution to discouraging ‘sweatshops’ but it does encourage change. Offering unique hand-crafted clothing usually means customers will be more likely to spend more, to cherish and keep the garment. This hopefully resulting in less waste, then less consumption.  

WEEK FIVE - Nick Cave and Femke Agema and Charles Freger

Emotional and physical experiences that clothing can give.
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NICK CAVE

Nick Cave is an american textile sculptor, dancer and performance artist. His project 'Sound Suits' is the creation of wearable garments that focus on sound, flow and visuals when worn during movement. He uses only 'found' objects to create his work - twigs, fur, buttons etc- so they're incredibly resourceful and environmentally friendly. I think this gives them much more intrigue and history.

The first suit, made of twigs was inspired by the brutal beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, 1992. He made the suit to represent armour. "To be heard you have to speak louder", and so he decided to base his sculptures on sound. Cave uses video to exhibit his pieces because they are made to be moved. The costumes static on mannequins seem out of place.

They inject fun, spontaneity and excitement into clothing.

I admire his use of old objects. Working with found materials takes a lot more initiative and skill than using new material. He has to "have a large volume" of the materials he plans to use, so sourcing the right material in a large quantity alone will be a struggle. The suits optimise everything I've been writing about within my research project. I think his work ethic comes from being brought up on hand-me-downs. It teaches you to not waste, and to be resourceful.

"It's the materials that provide impulse for me"
I can relate to this. The reason i'm so interested in fashion is because of my collections of second hand clothing that grew from my hand-me-downs. I couldn't bear to throw any of them away even when elastic had broken, and when my mum had taken my old clothes to use as cleaning rags I'd be upset. I didn't like material swapping purpose. I felt it should always be decorative and so the purpose of saving these clothes was to find a new use for them.

“It’s the materials that provide that impulse for me,” Cave tells Co.Design. “I may pass a beanie baby for 10 years, and then just one day, whoa, I’m vibing with something.” Cave, who runs the fashion department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, also has to take quantity into account. “I have to have a large volume of what I need to use.”To hold the pieces together, he uses different types of knotting techniques that function as a webbing infrastructure. And a lot of the suits--like the ones made of rugs or twigs--also have armatures underneath them, mostly made of fabricated metal, to give it the necessary volume. And on top of that, he uses draping techniques for embellishment and added volume. “For the most part we’re building three-dimensional cloth,” Cave continues. “The combination of that in addition to the apparatus underneath creates an unusual thing that opens up ideas associated with architecture, or as a body as a carrier or shell. [http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665221/nick-caves-sound-suits-stunning-wearable-art-for-modern-witch-doctors#2]

'Pretty much anything is material for Cave’s Soundsuits. The 54-year-old artist and Alvin Ailey-trained dancer has been foraging, recycling and repurposing since he was a kid.
“I was always a maker,” he said. “I would always make things with my hands.”
Cave grew up in Fulton, Mo. As one of eight boys, he even redesigned his hand-me-downs.
“I would cut the sleeves off, or add something to the surface,” he said. “So it was thinking about, how does one establish one’s identity being raised in a sort of lower-middle-class family, and not having much but realizing that the surplus around me was enough to keep my interest.”
Cave loves to incorporate the piles of stuff he finds in nature, on the street, or at antique flea markets. “What’s powerful about that is that you know you can make something out of nothing,” he said. '

So, like many other successful creatives he came from background of hand-me-downs and having to make-do.

This encourages the imagination to work overtime and see beauty and potential in seemingly ordinary objects.

http://artery.wbur.org/2013/03/04/nick-cave-soundsuits-peabody-essex

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FEMKE AGEMA

'The only limit is your imagination'

 'I think the world of fashion is already so fast. I like to dive in a theme or concept, so it works for me to work this way.'

Femke Agema combines art and fashion. She uses her more abstract pieces to draw attention to the ready-to-wear pieces.

Nigliktok (inuit word for “cold,” created as she says “for the inevitable snowpocalypse.”)

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Elders 

"Femke Agema’s Spring Summer 2013 collection, is her vision of the world springing into life after winter. It’s inspired by the simple joy we feel in being let loose into the wild to play in an environ-ment overflowing with possibilities. A world where you make treehouses, huts and rafts from whatever you can get your hands on. A world made to be explored, bursting with colours and textures, where the only limit is your imagination." http://thisispaper.com/Femke-Agema-S-S-2013

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Can you introduce yourself ? Tell us more about you and the beginning of the brand.My name is Femke Agema, and I am running a fashion label called Femke Agema. I started making collections in 2010, before that I was working as a freelance designer/artist. I was doing art projects, but at the same time I was making wearable clothes to sell. And at one point I missed to think in collections, I mean I missed telling a story with my clothes. So I decided to combine the two: wearable (and sellable) clothes and experimental objects.    [http://ligature.ch/2013/06/femke-agema-interview/]

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RELATED ARTIST- CHARLES FREGER

The photographer Freger captures other cultures unusual dress, in 'tribal' Europe.

This opens our eyes to the expressive dress that are still prominent in the present day.

ITALY - Schnappviecher (snapping beast) on Shrove Tuesday

AUSTRIA - Every five years the men of Telfs collect lichen to create Wilder Mann, or Wild Man, costumes for the town’s Carnival festival. Tradition dictates that they nibble on a piece of this lichen before the festivities.

FRANCE - Spring festivals in the Pyrenees feature local men playing the role of bears awakening from hibernation.

WEEK FOUR - Kaarina Kaikkonen and Jim Arendt

This week I wanted to explore the recycling of clothing in less traditional ways. One artist creates a permanent up-cycle of clothes, the other temporarily placing groups of one type of clothing in a formation.

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KAARINA KAIKKONEN

Kaikkonen is a leading Finnish artist who uses simple, everyday objects to create huge installations that reflect the spaces in which they are placed. She is best known for using second hand clothes, often men's shirts.

"Kaarina Kaikkonen uses simple, everyday objects such as second-hand clothing, toilet paper and women’s shoes, to create large-scale installations that articulate the architectural or open space in which her works are sited. She is best known for several major works using hundreds of discarded men’s jackets, which have a highly charged and personal significance for her. Though ambiguous in meaning, her works evoke associations of personal loss, collective memory, and local history."

I can admire the work for exploring the use of unusual materials within sculpture. The sheer size and quantity is impressive and shows how the multiplication of an object can install beauty into something that isn't normally considered that. The problem I have with the work is that I cant help but see wastage, and wonder where the clothes came from, and what's happening to them after.
I can imagine her thought process behind the sculptures. Collectively clothing can be fascinating and attractive, but each individual shirt holds a personal story. I think if there was an ecological side to her sculptures I would be more excited to read into the connotations.

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JIM ARENDT

Arendt is an artist that uses old and worn clothes to create portraits of people he knows. He chooses to represent family members, not as they are now, but how he remembers them.

"Denim was created to be abused, worn out, patched, stained, and burnt through with hot sparks. Its characteristics are mirrored in the individuals I choose to represent." 

His work I find incredibly inspiring. My whole life I've collected old clothes, especially ones that carried a memory or were made from a material I liked. I see them in uses other than clothing but I struggle to cut them up and detach the items from their former purpose. This work has made me think about ways I can now use these hoardings to develop their meaning and use as clothes, but within a 'painting' instead of on a body.

"I use art making as a way to investigate how the division of labor and alienation from work has impacted individual lives. My early engagement with work that was whole and undivided has left me with a persistent feeling that our present economic configuration has disenfranchised most of us from the finest use of our skills." 

I prefer the style of making he's used in the top image. By showing the seams and full pieces of jeans, it's more explanatory of the method he's used and feels most like a finished piece rather than a solitary figure. I've chosen the three images of his I feel are most interesting. The rest were just solitary figures made from jeans, but these three have more of a story within them. He's been more adventurous with composition and content which makes you want to learn more about the characters portrayed.

Yvette and Ainsley

Firecracker/Harper

CREATIVE RESPONSE TO WEEK THREE

Face painting has always been escapism for me. If i've had a tough days work I like to paint a new face on and immerse myself in a new form.

I'm a great fan of make-up and the effects it can have on peoples' personalities, as well as clothing. 

I decided to transform myself into new characters using makeup,  and document how it made me feel. 

I wanted to know how easy it would be to fool myself into thinking I really was this new character.

And if it would affect the way I dressed.

no.1 Drag

• I immediately felt flamboyant.
•  I wanted to show people my face to see their reactions.
• I moved my face slower and held any faces I pulled for a longer amount of time.
• I felt extremely comfortable in my actions. 
• The make-up felt like a mask and I could act like someone else, become someone else, without being accused of being fake or strange.
• I felt ridiculous in the casual clothes I was wearing. I wanted to dress fabulous. I felt I could wear  extravagant clothing but feel a lot more comfortable than usual.
• I chose to use webcam to document this because it allowed me to view myself as the photo was being taken, to insure I looked the best I could.

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No.2 Clown

• I felt fickle and changeable.
• I pulled my hair up into a mop so it could hang around my face. 
• I wanted to pull strange faces and scare.
• I chewed a disclosing tablet to make my tongue go pink, because it seemed right.
• What I was wearing didn't seem to matter. 
• I used an SLR to document this because I preferred to act the character without seeing myself. I could then look at the photos afterwards. I used a shallow focus and different effects. Afterwards I was quite shocked at the pictures.

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No.3 Mutton dressed as Lamb

• I linked 'looking old but pretending to be young' with a drunken feeling.
• The wrinkles made me feel uncomfortable but pretending to be drunk felt similar to being drunk, and boosted my confidence.
• I picked silly items of clothing from my wardrobes and tried them on, but didn't want to show anyone.
• I used the glare protecter (created the ring) to take pictures. It felt like I was distancing myself from the pictures by viewing them through a tunnel.
• Looking back at the pictures was uncomfortable, I looked ridiculous  in a lot of them and the makeup looked out of place.

WEEK THREE - Gilbert&George, and Nikki S. Lee

GILBERT&GEORGE

The pair are living sculptures. They've dedicated their whole lives to being a performance.
They're best recognised for their smart attire - suits, hats and tweed
When being photographed they strike the same poses - 'George's eyes chill into a thousand-yard stare; Gilbert's expression mutates into that of an angry bulldog, undone by a ­comically raised right eyebrow'

‘Our subject matter is the world. It is pain. Pain. Just to hear the world turning is pain, isn’t it? Totally, every day, every second. Our inspiration is all those people alive today on the planet, the desert, the jungle, the cities. We are interested in the human person, the complexity of life.' Gilbert & George

'Why do they dress so smartly? "We used to say because we never wanted to be the artists their mothers would be ashamed of, but it didn't work out quite like that."
Are their mothers ashamed of them? "No, they're very proud." says George, quickly. "We don't alienate anyone. The suits are very good because they are odd. We always get a table at a ­restaurant anywhere in the world. We're never searched at airports. Even boys on bicycles with crazy dyed hair will screech to a halt and say, "Great suits, guys!' They enable us to get away with a lot."'

The suits they wear and their presentation of their bodies is one of the main recognisable and defining features of the pair.

NIKKI S. LEE - Punk Project Series

Nikki Lee is a performance artist come photographer.
The punk project is a series of photographs of Lee in disguise, becoming different members of communities. She addresses identity and 'place'. Who we are who we surround ourselves with, and how that is perceived by others. She transforms herself and places herself within the image, performing identity.
The photographs are capturing 'non-moments' – a snapshot that might trigger a time and place in personal memory for the participants or their circle of friends, but for those outside of this circle, the picture is a just snapshot.

"Her images dig deep into the construction of community and ego, of social roles and what it means to be self-defined and/or categorized by someone else. She ultimately asks, are personal identity and communal identity fluid?"

The  Senior Project (14) 1999

The Drag Queen Project (2) 1997

The act of questioning what the photo is about is the key thing here. You don't realise Lee is pretending, you assume she is just part of the photo and you wonder what the fuss about and what makes this art. It's only when you see the series together and recognise the same face camouflaging so well into each of the backgrounds, that you can appreciate the art.

I like the accessibility of Lee's art. A lot of people are skeptical about performance art. Here, the whole act of researching, transforming and becoming is condensed into one portrait. The audience is likely familiar with the other subject matters, and how they act, so we begin thinking about how she would have been acting to fit in, or at least I do.

Lee has used clothes and makeup to transform herself into each character and social group. But what is the difference between what she does, and what we each do everyday in the morning. We assign ourselves our specific group of society, and dress to fit that stereotype.

"It is not the case that an individual is first a skinhead and then wears all the gear, but that the gear constitutes the individual as a skinhead. It is the social interacting, by means of the clothing, that produces the individual as a member of the group rather than vice-versa, that one is member of the group and then interacts socially" [p.32 Fashion as Communication]

CREATIVE RESPONSE TO WEEK TWO

After exploring Bart Hess' work I started thinking about new ways I could project clothing , without it being textile.

By using a food product i'm also bringing to light ideas of wastage.
Often people don't think about the effects that clothes wastage have on the world around them.
Food wastage seems to be a clearer wrong-doing to the general public because, along with water, it's one of the few true necessities of survival.
As i'm addressing in my written exploration, 'disposable' clothing is indirectly causing a lot of other problems, including underpayment which means poverty. So those supporting fast fashion, but slamming food wastage are hypocritical.

My food wastage is incredibly low, if not non-existant. This is because of my up-bringing. Although I did feel guilty, I see my housemates and people around me throwing food away without having had any use at all which is a lot harder to accept.

The cucumbers take the place of trousers … how the represent wastage and one time use etc

WEEK TWO - LUCY AND BART + BART HESS

Leading on from last week, I wanted to investigate more unusual body coverings and whether they classified as fashion or art.

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\\LUCY AND BART//

About the Artists :

“Lucyandbart” is a collaboration between artists Lucy McRae and Bart Hess. In it they imagine human bodies and faces physically altered with a shocking but artistic realism. Globules of foam, asymmetric spines… fascinating and repugnant simultaneously, the pictures become even more disturbing because they don’t hint at the emotional state of the subject. Each transformed human looks blankly back at you, neither horrified or surprised or excited about their change of form, but merely present and allowing it to be shown to you."

Dripping Colour

This and 'evolution' below have a 'found object' and recycling appearance, using familiar objects to create new shapes and characters. The pair aren't just photographing models they're creating new people by posing and building out the bodies underneath. It feels like an illustration, photography and fashion are it's mediums but it can't be classed under either title. 

Evolution 

 Although typically clothing (you can see the tights seams and structure) you don't directly associate this with fashion. I think the photography/filming plays a big part in Lucy and Barts projection of an idea. I can see similarities between their creations and haute couture fashion on the catwalk but their main aim isn't to shape and cover the body.

Exploded View

Germination Day One

Germination Day Eight

Grow on You

One of my favourite ideals of their art is its' not permanent. I think that's the key differentiation between their artwork and fashion. Clothing stays marginally the same throughout its life, with particular materials wearing apart but staying recognisable. Although not all of their work is textile, it still provides a valid reasoning that body coverage doesn't have to be strictly clothing.

Is the work Fashion or Art?

Most definitely art. No traditional textile materials are used and the materials are sculpted onto the body. They seem constructed as an art piece with a specific outcome in mind, which relies on the bodies being posed and photographed. Particularly in 'exploded view'. The outfits could not be worn for extended amounts of time and are clearly never intended for use as clothing or fashion, even if toned down. What I plan to do in one of my own investigations is along a similar theme of applying abstract onto the body, but concentrating on how the outfit affects the body and senses. 

They work entirely from instinct and exploration with no preconceived idea of the end product. After reading up on what makes art, art, spontaneity is one of the main differences between a craft and fine art. Craft is meticulously planned, and in fashion sense - altered, arranged, redone and then toned down for multiple different versions. Art is a one off, an expression of an individual or group.

Below on their collaboration with a stylist, they've paired their artwork with textiles which provides a direct comparison between the two mediums. Although they compliment each other, they're wildly different. Being worn next to sharp uncomfortable objects, the trousers look much more comfortable than they would on an undecorated body. 

Like the china polo shirt by LI, Lucy and Bart have also worked with high end fashion brands to advertise and present their clothing...

AnOtherMan

"In a fusion of contemporary fashion and the human form, celebrated stylist Alister Mackie collaborates with avant-garde artists Lucy McRae and Bart Hess of LucyandBart to fashion sculptural, surreal extensions of the body – paired with animalistic outerwear from the A/W 2010 collections. The artistic duo LucyandBart are known for whimsical manipulations of the human body, and they love to use outlandish materials like foam and beds of grass. Though their elaborate pieces of art seem meticulously calculated, you’ll be surprised to find that the duo works entirely from instinct and exploration, with no preconceived concept of the end product. Normally, Lucy and Bart play the parts of both model and photographer interchangeably, but this time, Nick Knight will be behind the lens capturing the spectacle to grace the pages of the A/W 2010 issue of AnOther Man alongside fashions from Rick Owens, Comme des Garçons and Vivienne Westwood."

\\BART HESS//

Slime

Mutants

On his own, the work gets a little darker, more alien-like, especially with the hidden faces. With a material that isn't neat in the slightest, it simply can't be planned or touched up, Hess would have had to work directly and spontaneously onto the model. 

It changes my perception of the work knowing that most of Hess's solo work is commissioned, whereas the duo were being immediately creative with no direction. In that sense i think it's slightly less in the realm of fine art and he would be working more under an illustrators title.

This reminds me of Boo Ritsons album cover she did for the Maccabees, using her traditional style of slopped paint on portraits. 

SIMILAR ARTIST - MARCUS COATES

(1968 − ), Mayfly, Ephemeroptera (Subimago stage) Self Portait, flour and water, 2013, courtesy of British Council 

Creative Response to week one

WEEK ONE - LI XIAOFENG + HECTOR HERNANDEZ

To begin I've looked at artists that suggest clothing but by using much harsher, uncomfortable materials
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 LI XIAOFENG

'Made in China' series

What do I think of his work?

I'm a big fan. I love any work that you can see the time and effort engrained into. I prefer the work he's done that includes a figure. What Xiaofeng is trying to say with his use of antique china I feel is enhanced by the use of a body within the clothing. I get more of a sense of history from these sculptures, even if they are a little more obvious. I think if the clothing was made more obviously antique then it would work better. I'm very inspired by his use of material though. I've been thinking about what makes clothing fine art - by changing the person wearing the clothes, the environment around them, the materials they're made from etc. I think changing materials is probably the most direct way to step away from fashion into fine art.

Is it considered fine art?

The pieces are created from broken porcelain that he sources from ancient archeological digs. He shapes, polishes, then drills holes into each piece to string them together with silver wire. He classes the process as 'rearranging landscapes'. The pieces are usually in the form of clothing, traditional Chinese dresses and jackets, as well as military uniforms. Although each piece would have to be meticulously planned and constructed - a process which some class as a definition of craft -, the history and intent behind each piece, as well as each sculptures uniqueness, stops it from being a mundane activity.

Does it count as textiles?

They are technically wearable, but would take a lot of reconstruction and help to enter the clothing. It's similar to armour, and in the same realm as 'clothing' like Franc Fernandez's 2010 meat dress, worn by Lady Gaga.

He was commissioned by the clothing brand Lacoste in 2010 to design polo shirts that reflected his sculptural style. For this, he photographed the china and assembled it digitally. Although not as impactful as the original sculptures, it creates a garment that has a lot more history and meaning than most.

I plan to do a similar thing in my own experimentation. By using a scale of pieces - starting off with the highly abstract and toning it down in steps until you're left with a piece of clothing adept for the high street. I can then ask a varied audience which of the pieces they consider fine art, and when it slips into merely being a piece of clothing.

“For the limited edition printed polo, he chose blue and white shards with lotus and children designs from the Kangxi Period (1662 – 1772 AD) of the Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1911 AD). The lotus grows from mud underwater to emerge as a flower, symbolising purity and rebirth. Images of babies represent fertility, as during that period the high infant mortality rate meant that people decorated ceramics with babies hoping they would be blessed with children.” (Official press via Lacoste)

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HECTOR HERNANDEZ

Using a similar theme to Xiaofeng is Hernandez. By placing irregular materials on a body to cover the models modesty, it turns them into clothing in the viewers eyes. This sheet of metal, that we recognise as harsh, sharp and jagged, has been sculpted in such a way to suggest fluidity. I think a lot of breaching the gap between clothing and art is by falsifying materials and disguising their original characteristics. Bart Hess uses this a lot, and creates video that shows how the use of material affects movement and behaviour.

The photo has a childlike nature with the relaxed pose, widely placed feet and the hiding of the face. Similar to animals, young children would find this calming if stressed because they can no longer see what's upsetting them.