Bhalo (2009 - 2018) was a fashion label that worked with fair trade organisations in rural Bangladesh to create limited edition garments using hand woven fabrics, printing & embroidery. Through my work with Bhalo I noticed apparent knowledge gaps present in contemporary Australian society towards textiles. The label became an opportunity to explore creative ways of expressing aspects of the making process to the customer. The textile became a vehicle to make the wearer consider the construction attributes of the piece, without having to rely solely on narratives produced through external media such as tags, website information and social media.

This work examines how the ‘unravelled’ thread can act as a spatial and temporal representation of the greater woven textile. Methods centre on processes of undoing, disentangling, deconstruction and reconstruction of isolated elements/threads. This work includes:

Golden Obstacle jewellery piece (2019) and accompanying documentation (line studies), exhibited at the Kasbah Aghenaj Museum, curated by Maria Blaisse, Amina Agueznay and Salima Naji (Tiznit, Morocco)

Weaving the Oasis (2019) Exploratory design work as completed through a collaborative program with Slow Lab (Amsterdam, Netherlands), the Association Gardiens de la Mémoire, Association Abrinaz, Coopérative Féminine d’Amendil, and the Centre de Formation Professionnelle des Métiers de l’Artisanat (Tiznit, Morocco)

I placed one of my hand looms in a clothing store in High St, Fremantle, where customers and passers-by could observe the weaving process and participate in the weaving of a communal textile. The weaves, patterns and effects which resulted relay a narrative of the people involved. Varying levels of skill, time and personality are observable through the resulting length of cloth. The idea is to demonstrate the fundamentals of textile construction, increasing respect for cloth and reducing the tendency to see textiles as a disposable commodity.

The loom has since shifted to Collab, a store within the Fremantle Markets. An observable difference emerged in the textile from one site to another, demonstrating how location may be incidentally embedded in to woven cloth.

More images coming soon…