Press release
Unbound: Gathering material, Angela Rowe
Larnach Castle and Otago Polytechnic, 21st – 23rd September 2018.
Delegates attending the Costume and Textile Association of New Zealand’s annual symposium, Unbound: Liberating Women and the symposium dinner are warmly invited to contribute to the project Unbound: Gathering material by Angela Rowe.
This project involves the creation of a garment that may be viewed as an historical document, recording the symposium as an event. It may represent a physical ‘checking in’, a common practice on social media, while the finished object becomes a tangible document of this event, a collection of autographs or marks which may represent the only time this group of individuals are present together.
How can you contribute?
You are invited to add your signature or unique mark to pieces of a garment that Angela will sew over the course of the weekend. Your participation is voluntary.
What happens next?
The finished garment, photographs and other documentation will be circulated to participants and may be exhibited in the future, shared on social media and on Angela’s blog as part of her MFA studies. This material may also be incorporated into future projects.
If you would like to stay up to date with the progress of this project, leave your email address on the sheet provided.
About Angela’s practice:
Angela lives and works in Whangarei and is an MFA candidate at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design. Her studio research circulates around a number of themes, including performance, evocative objects and the usually private world of the home interior. Focusing on domestic concerns around care and ‘maintenance’ work, a term used by Mierle Laderman Ukeles to describe the care work she did daily as a mother, work is identified as something that is mostly hidden and taken for granted. In this context work can involve both physical and emotional labour.
For Unbound: Gathering material, her work focuses on the significance of the individual signature and human relationships, moving within the fields of social anthropology and relational aesthetics. Elements of this project reference traditional domestic tasks usually undertaken by women and suggest activities that connect generations.
This framework offers a means to understand relationships and is a way to make connections through individuals and time, using the experience of the symposium and the relationships that occur to develop narratives and acknowledge memories.
Concluding in a performance in which the garment developed is sewn to completion and the work witnessed publicly throughout the symposium, Unbound: Liberating Women, the project aims to evoke ideas around labour, the body, social relations and women’s work. These are concerns that are still relevant in 2018, as we mark 125 years of women gaining the right to vote.
MFA blog
https://angelacartermfa.wordpress.com/
Blog
https://www.instagram.com/prettymermaidspurse/
Thank you to my generous sponsors and supporters, I couldn’t do it without you xo
My costs for this project have been covered by a Quick Response Grant from Creative New Zealand, and my equipment is being supplied by CTANZ members and Otago Polytechnic.
mermaids purse 