Hannah Chamley

What I wore in the Foyer, 2012/13

Hannah Charley was the recipient of the Sofitel / Craft FRESH! Emerging Craft Practitioners Award in 2011.  The award includes the opportunity for the winning artist to exhibit new work at Sofitel Melbourne On Collins in the following year.

 

Wearing clothes is an everyday experience; habitual, familiar and unconsidered. When we dress we place cloth around our bodies, engaged in fabric boundaries. These walls frame us with the fleshy solidarity of ourselves. Where does such space begin and end. Can you pattern-make an embodied garment? Is there a blue-print of wearing? 

 

Pattern-making is a tool of fashion production. It is a representation of a garment in two-dimensional form. The pattern is a map, indicating how a garment will be shaped and made. It can be seen as showing the intention of a particular fashion space. In usual pattern making, each fabric wall is drafted as it stands, running up and down the body’s length. By interrupting the routine method of making fashion, we may better understand its experience.

 

What I Wore in the Foyer contemplates fashion space as a scope or spreading expanse giving a particular understanding to its shape and form. Horizontal cuts of the worn perimeter are drafted. Each pattern piece lays one upon another to cast the topography of a worn garment. As the shape of worn fashion space is formed by the idiosyncrasies and moments of the wearer’s experience, the landscape of the pattern stacks too are haunted by the feeling of the bodies perimeter.

 

Think not of what you see before you as a sculpture but as a pile of pattern pieces, placed on the floor of the Sofitel Melbourne On Collins foyer. These sheets of cardboard are a draft of garments, their phenomena frozen and formed, in the environment in which they are worn.

 

Hannah Chamley, November 2012

 

Hannah graduated with a Bachelor of Fashion Design RMIT in 2011. 

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