Looking beyond the warp and weft: unpicking latent narratives in clothing

This article presents my on-going practice in which I explore and reveal perceived memory and experience that is imbued in worn clothing, specifically through my recent work Łódź Blouse Trilogy. In this work, I undertook a series of interventions on blouses in order to reveal dormant and latent matter—details from a single photographic image of a tea party in Poland’s Łódź ghetto. Łódź Blouse Trilogy and related work addresses the use of textiles, cloth, and clothing as a rich landscape to explore and communicate complex ideas within a fine art context. I also seek to present knowledge and provoke thinking on a series of levels, from craft skills to contemporary scientific and psychological thinking. We are intimately familiar with the physicality and materiality of clothing. Thus, this work offers a “safe” fluid entry point to discuss and stimulate thinking around inherited memory, biological and metaphorical transference, personal recall and repression, our sense of self and the ability of cloth and clothes to hold and translate human experience. Fascinated with the creative implications of what is left behind in the clothes we wear, and supported by my experience of working with Alison Fendly at the Forensic Science Service, I have sought to make visible a personal response. The use of garment construction/deconstruction, digital embroidery and dye-sublimation printing have made this work manifest

Renaissance attachment to things: material culture in last wills and testaments

Over the past decade ‘material culture’ has become a sub-discipline of Italian Renaissance studies. This literature, however, has focused on the rich and their objects preserved in museums or reflected in paintings. In addition, the period 1300 to 1600 has been treated without attention to changes in the relationship between people and possessions. The article turns to last wills and testaments, which survive in great numbers and sink deep roots through late medieval and Renaissance cities and their hinterlands. They reveal aspirations and anxieties about things from post-mortem repairs to farm houses to pillows of monk's wool. These aspirations changed fundamentally after the Black Death. Earlier, during the ‘commercial revolution’, ordinary merchants, artisans, and peasants on their deathbeds practised what the mendicants preached: stripping themselves of their possessions, they converted their estates to coin to be scattered among pious and non-pious beneficiaries. After the Black Death, testators began to reverse tack, devising ever more complex legal strategies to govern the future flow of their goods. This work of the dead had larger economic consequences. By encouraging the liquidation of estates, the earlier mendicant ideology quickened the velocity of exchange, while the early Renaissance attachment to things did the opposite

Materialising memories: exploring the stories of people with dementia through dress

In this article, we use clothes as a tool for exploring the life stories and narratives of people with dementia, eliciting memories through the sensory and material dimensions of dress. The article draws on an Economic and Social Research Councilfunded study, ‘Dementia and Dress’, which explored everyday experiences of clothing for carers, care workers and people with dementia, using qualitative and ethnographic methods including: ‘wardrobe interviews’, observations, and visual and sensory approaches. In our analysis, we use three dimensions of dress as a device for exploring the experiences of people with dementia: kept clothes, as a way of retaining connections to memories and identity; discarded clothes, and their implications for understanding change and loss in relation to the ‘dementia journey’; and absent clothes, invoked through the sensory imagination, recalling images of former selves, and carrying identity forward into the context of care. The article contributes to understandings of narrative, identity and dementia, drawing attention to the potential ofmaterial objects for evoking narratives, and maintaining biographical continuity for both men and women. The paper has larger implications for understandings of ageing and care practice; as well as contributing to the wider Material Turn in gerontology, showing how cultural analyses can be applied even to frail older groups who are often excluded from such approaches

Memory, space and time: Researching children's lives

This article discusses the research approach in 'Pathways through Childhood', a small qualitative study drawing on memories of childhood. The research explores how wider social arrangements and social change influence children's everyday lives.The article discusses the way that the concepts of social memory, space and time have been drawn on to access and analyse children's experiences, arguing that attention to the temporal and spatial complexity of childhood reveals less visible yet formative influences and connections. Children's everyday engagements involve connections between past and present time, between children, families, communities and nations, and between different places. Children carve out space and time for themselves from these complex relations. © The Author(s) 2010