This is my film's (Song of the Sanctuary) original costume. It forms the basis of my current submission. The work explores the feeling of estrangement due to war and the complicated placement of fashion within the art context: between commodity, artwork, body and memory.
This work resists easy categorisation, suspended between the sartorial and the sculptural. Constructed from a carpet textile, it's a material that carries within it the weight of domesticity, cultural memory, and commodity; the garment holds a dual identity. Structured enough to be worn, object-like enough to stand (lie) alone; both fashion and sculpture, without sacrificing either. Displayed as an installation, half suspended half on the ground, deliberately playing with its complex object / human form. Freed from the body while it remains haunted by it, a sartorial artefact that has become autonomous.
Within Song of the Sanctuary, the costume marks a threshold. As the film moves from the figurative toward the increasingly abstract, the garment ceases to dress the performer and begins to choreograph them. In the film's final sequence, the performer moves against and with it, lying down on the floor, becoming carpet, becoming object, until they flow into one another. What emerges is a tension between a human being and an essentially inanimate thing. This was my exploration of estrangement and nostalgia in the context of war. As I have discovered it is the strange attachment to often inanimate things that our child memories breathe life into. These memories are always vivid and colourful and somehow only feel warmer with time inevitably separating us further apart from them. It is the desire to want to become part of that environment again, that was once so full of love and wonder.
