Red Shirt and Blue Shirt are two garments in a continuous process of repair. Neither is finished. Both are returned to regularly, accumulating repair, stitch and patch over time as the fabric ages and the thinking develops.
Red Shirt began as a pyjama top in need of mending. Over six years it has become something else: a record of personal change, the repairs increasing in frequency as the original fabric wears thin. The mending is the process.
Blue Shirt was my husband’s shirt, worn through and cast off. It is being worked in kantha style, a tradition rooted in Bangladesh, slowly populated with fish and river plants. A garden shirt becoming a river. A rewilding.
When exhibited, the shirts were accompanied by visible practice and invitational conversation, a handmade zine on repair, resilience and transformation, and the offer of a conversation about what each visitor needed to repair, and why. The shirts provided a prompt; the conversations were the work.
