Pattern making

Thinking about gender roles and gendered items that this research has touched upon, I want to revisit this path as I don’t think I documented everything. 

It came up in the Greenham Common blog and the idea that women were using their domestic skills to communicate political ideologies by producing these incredible protest banners that were a combination of “housewife skills” such as patchwork, appliqué, embroidery, etc. 

I attended a workshop where I used a dustpan as my object to learn about pattern cutting and I played with the idea of subverting a gendered item to create form within fabric. 

This led me to look into Linder Sterling and her photography that played with collage, and abstracting the female form with household objects. 

I reached out to my group of female friends and asked them what they considered to be a gendered object within their homes and the two most common items were irons and hoovers. Based on this, I practised my pattern cutting with my iron at home by masking taping it and deconstructing it. During this exercise, it was the iron plate was the shape that stood out to me, I think it would work well as a repeat pattern that can be layered, it also has an almost leaf likeness to it.

Now I am experimenting with the clothes from the charity shop and how I can practice my creativity by layering the fabrics and using whatever materials I have available to me, embellishing the garments similiarly to how the Greenham Common women did. 

Having experimented with the Trash top first, I want to reintroduce the gendered household items into my practice. I consider Fast Fashion to be a gendered concept, a marketing ploy that has existed since the 60’s to keep women distracted from what is actually happening in the world. An economic constraint, keeping women poorer than men, where women often end up in debt whilst trying to keep up with the latest trends. Fashion is a product of patriarchy and capitalism. And whilst we’re feeding into this structure that has been created to contain us, created to provide us with unattainable beauty standards and expectations, we are also portrayed as being frivolous with money for spending our money on clothes, accessories, makeup and treatments (manicures, waxing, botox, fillers). This reminds me of Ester Magyar work at the Cult of Beauty exhibition. Put a pin in that for now. 

I digress…. 

Revisiting the iron, I want to print the iron onto my fabrics. Using Adobe Capture to create a vector image for screen printing, I simplified the form using the iron metal plate as one shape and also the iron profile as a second option. Initially I’d though about printing that true to size and then embroidering over the top but having knocked back the colour and detail, the metal iron plate shape lends itself to being used as a petal and I could create a repeat flower print not obvious at a glance that the print is of an iron. 

An artist that is known for their repeat patterns and interesting use of colour is Andy Warhol. I recently attended his exhibition of his textiles and the prints he produced in the 50’s before he became prominent in the 60’s for his contemporary pop art. The repeat patterns that he did were very ordinary, everyday objects. Whether it was stationary, shoes, food, flags or gardening equipment, just mundane, day-to-day things. I feel like an iron would fit nicely into that list.

I would like to go as simple as five petals in a circle to create a flower print and then repeat (similar to Warhols Watermelon print, 1956) but also whilst using Adobe Capture I played with like the idea of repeat patterns and ended up with these. 

I like the idea of taking the iron (female), breaking it down to just the metal element (masculine) then creating this flower (nature) print that is something quite delicate (feminine).

References

Linder: Femme/Objet, Paris (28 February 2013) Aesthetica. https://aestheticamagazine.com/linder-femme-objet-paris/

Andy Warhol : The Textiles ─ A Retrospective Exhibition At The Fashion & Textile Museum (n.d) Texintel. https://www.texintel.com/press-room/andy-warhol-the-textilesa-retrospective-exhibition-at-the-fashion-textile-museum