Forget Me Not ,part one.

  

 

So, what's it like not being able to touch other people for months on end? What do you feel about the world when you only interact with the packaging of things you bought online?  What is reality when you can only watch the suffering of others on a laptop screen?

 It has taken me a long time to be able to make any new work but with funding from the UK Arts Council I have developed the Forget Me Not project. There are three parts and this is the first section called 'Copes and Shifts'; a book of twelfth scale garments. It  references the couture garment sample books of the late 19thC which Paris couturiers used to show their ideas to clients abroad. This however is a book of Cultural Shifts and Emotional Copes to inhabit from afar.

 The first Cultural Shift is called 'Awake'.

  Shifts were an undergarment worn by all women as underwear until the 20thC. and the pattern for this one was found in the Janet Arnold 'Patterns of Fashion' books.

  Made from an antique linen handkerchief this little shift is embroidered with a weeping eye and looks at Elizabethan culture, activism and shame. I have a long fascination with the embroidered eyes on early modern embroidery and in particular the 'Rainbow' portrait of Elizabeth 1st with its' symbolic eyes and ears on the dress. In that portrait she is also depicted wearing a very unusual and little known garment called a conch. This is essentially a super fine shawl with a wired edge at the top, a very expensive and elite garment.I made this tiny one in cotton organdie and lightly embroidered around the edges. The word 'awake', embroidered in detached buttonhole stitch is pinned with an entomology pin to the front of the shift.

I decided to keep the original embroidery of the hanky on the back of the shift with it's little forget-me-nots.