Environmental Portrait III

Part Two Reflections

Title of Work: Les Vêtements

For part two of the Environmental Portrait, I decide to fully actualize the experience of stepping into somebody else’s closet. Nile brought some of her most meaningful and interesting pieces of clothing and I hung them up on a rack, presenting them as if inside a closet.

I wanted to continue to stress the contradictions and juxtaposition Nile has experienced in her life while simultaneously emphasizing how there is a limit to how much we can learn about a person by their choice of clothing (we can learn a lot, but not everything).

I decided to make square handkerchiefs and print both antonymic words as well as stories Nile had told me about her clothes onto them. The stories are printed in Nile’s own words, and I hid them inside of the clothing’s pockets and asked the class to search inside the clothes and read what they found. During the presentation, I thought to myself that it reminded me of an Easter Egg hunt — a little childlike, looking for a treasure!

First, I designed the different fonts and colours I wanted to use to print onto the hankies. I narrowed down my word choice from the words I used in the video. I decided to use only the words that I felt most reflected what I wanted to express about Nile in her portrait, and I used the stories that were most meaningfully tied to her articles of clothing.

I was unable to find handkerchiefs in the stores, so I decided to make my own. I cut a white bed sheet in half, and then in half, and in half again to make several little hankie size squares. I ironed them and then put them inside the fabric printer. This particular fabric printer does not print clean cut lines, particularly with small letter fonts. The ink on the hankies looked messy, and although not an artistic choice, I liked the messiness of the ink. Although Nile’s life is full of sharp contrasts and juxtapositions of places, feelings, thoughts, and personality traits, life itself is never clean cut or straight lined or black and white. Everybody is a little rough around the edges, filled with grey areas, and sometimes we even have a dirty handerchief in our pockets.

If I were to expand on this project, I would first expand it in physical size. I imagine a clothing rack in the shape of a circle, filled with 30-40 outfits instead of seven. The viewer is able to walk around the outside or inside (by crawling under the clothes like a child in a department store — I have strong memories of hiding between clothing racks while my mother shopped at the JC Penny) of the circle, free to touch, smell, try on, and interact with the clothes.

Inside of the clothing articles would be hidden a handkerchief as well, only this time it would be embroidered with words and stories instead of with ink. The hankies would originally correspond with the clothing item they were found in, but overtime, after several people have interacted with the clothes, the hankies would most likely become jumbled around creating a new concept: jumbled memory and how we correlate our material possessions to stories.

Overall, I was excited about the way Part Two developed and the outcome during the presentation. I felt that what I wanted to portray about Nile was more clearly expressed compared to Part One. The interactive experience made the presentation much more deeply personal to Nile and her day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, immediate environment — her clothing. She lives her life in these clothes, and touching, smelling, feeling the inside of her clothing is a step into her senses.

Additionally, the use of finding the hankies with words written on them, instead of listening to my voice read them out over a video as I did in Part One, shows how you must go inside, break the ice, talk to a person, before you can hear their stories. It is impossible to do through the mere spectacle. Understanding an intimate environment, a personality, and being able to recognize a faceless portrait of somebody — and perhaps what could more accurately be called a portrait of the soul — can only be accomplished through listening, sensing, feeling, the environment, the personality, and the soul itself.

 

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