Clothing represents an essential part of what we are, what we live and what we experience. A garment is a physical representation of our emotional scrapbook, our relationships and memories. One garment can capture the past, experience the present and guard us from the future.
For this assignment, we were asked to represent visually what we cannot do physically. We were asked to work with something so personal and abstract as time, and make it concrete and eternal. Working from an inspirational picture, Frozen in Time had to capture the past, present and future in one.
As a result, this jacket intends to portray the life of a victim, one who has suffered one of the greatest catastrophes in the human history and has managed to survive. One who has covered itself with scars and has tried to move on in life with an injured past.
Original Picture
My initial picture depicted a woman and a child who had survived to the Hiroshima bomb in 1945, and were covered in their own burnt skin, showing affection and emotion through the lens of the camera. With this in mind, I covered the inside of the garment with black and white paper pictures of the stories that the victim wants to hide, while the outside has been symbolically shaped to portray human scars and burnt skin. There, the found texture intended to make an allusion to the skin’s conditions after being under circumstances of high temperatures.
On another note, and with regards to its presentation, the garment was intentionally made the main focus of the project. For this reason, the piece was exhibited between two transparent sheets of plastic. Furthermore, a rustic rope hanged the work from the ceiling in order to give an emphasis to the rural lifestyle of the victims in the original picture. Some of the suggestions considered looking at other materials for the rope, such as one that would be used by them or that was made from typical materials of the era/area. Others included wrinkling the pictures inside the garment to integrate them more in the final composition.
The objects which surround us serve as a kind of mirror that reflects our own image. They embody and signify past experiences through its appearance, and carry information about the past into the future. They have been through time and life.
This is a mirror of someone’s past and present.
This is the mirror of a victim.
Texture – Pictures:
Pictures Inside The Garment:
