Cloth

Cloth, 2002-23

A series of single, double-layered and multi-piece silver gelatin photographic film works made without a camera recording the shadows of muslin (cotton) fabric. Each film or film sandwich is encapsulated in a Mylar envelope and displayed backlit on light tables. Unique objects. A work-in-progress.

Cloth girds us materially and sutures the social tissue binding us together. Cloth-related tropes permeate our language and thought, from the thread of ideas and the emperor who has no clothes to the world-wide-web and string theory. Cloth-garments have always expressed our humanity but today weave an industrial mantle tearing at our biosphere’s fabric. In classical Greek myth Clotho – one of The Three Fates – spun the thread of human life. Twisted, stretched, rolled, folded and ripped, the delicate muslin of this photogram series’ cast shadows redolent, variously, of celestial formations, topographic grid models, laminar flows and atmospheric vortices, strange creatures, veils, shrouds and dancing phantoms. Metaphors for the fragility of an unravelling world and entanglements we are yet to unpick.

Cloth #6 has been reiterated as an inkjet print viewable here: Cloth (print).