Tara Dress

For Earth Day 2013 I made a new dress, which began a whole new investigation into my Weedrobes series, namely working with the movement of the armature created for the garment. As often happens with this work ,I do not have much time to contemplate scenarios because the plants are in bloom and the window of opportunity is short. I did realize that the dress covered with fresh material and the dance with the armature where 2 separate projects, so I concentrated on making the fresh dress and the movement piece will come sometime in the future. The concept for the dress came from a cage-like hoop skirt by one of my favourite all time designers Jean-Paul Gauthier. I made the armature with fresh Willow branches from my yard and covered it with Magnolia leaves. The bodice was covered with Camellia flowers also from my garden. I discovered an abandoned Tudor house and the Tara {from Gone with the Wind} concept was born. A post-apocalictic eco-warrior, Miss Rosa Styles, returns to her home to rebuild. We had planned to also do a street intervention that day but it began to hail so we had to cancel that part but we did the photo shoot when the sun came out and the result was very cinematic. Special thanks to the crew: model: Nita Bowerman, Photo Assistant: Kathleen Loski, Makeup: April Beer, Video: Martin Borden, Transportation: Tanya Hockley and flower wranglers: Marina and Celia.

Miss Rosa Styles returns home

Camellia flowers, Magnolia leaves, Lilac flowers, Willow, Reed and thorns.

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The Little Green Dress Projekt

The Little Green Dress Projekt was an outdoor installation in the Earth Art Exhibition at VanDusen Botanical Garden in the summer and fall of 2012. For a full description of the project and to view photos please visit the LGD blog. I was on site for 2 months creating these pieces and installing them one at a time in the perennial garden. They were left to change and decompose over time to emphasize the process of nature. Each dress was made for an individual woman who supplied the leaves and flowers for her dress. Four women worn their dresses for the exhibition opening  on August 2nd. In attendance were the curator, John Grande and artists Nils Udo, Urs Twellman, Chris Booth and Michael Dennis. Many thanks to my helpers Nita Bowerman, Martin Borden and Ruth Wolf who made the armatures for each dress. Also special thanks go to garden director, Harry Jongerden who was responsible for the exhibition and his tireless assistant Tracee Jung. The exhibition was well received in the press thanks to publicist Nancy Wong.

composite of 21 dresses

 Martin Borden created a short video of the dresses worn on opening night.

Raymond Chan also created a video of the project

made from Magnolia leaves, Hydrangea flowers and Globe Thistle.

Barbara’s dress after 2 months outdoors, turned a golden brown patina from sun wind and rain.

The Nomadik Harvest Dress

Nomadik Harvest Dress with Lorraine Matheson Heidi

The Nomadik Harvest Dress was completed during a 2 week art residency at the McMichael Art Gallery in June 2012 in collaboration with the Fashionality Exhibition. This wearable architecture is the second piece in the Urban Foragers {house of eco drifters} series, which began with the Mobile Garden Dress. The design is based on the yurts I experienced while in Mongolia. The skirt is created from a folding bamboo fence and Willow struts sewn into a wool waistband.  The traditional felt outer covering is replaced with crazy quilt of woollen sweaters, which have been shrunken and dyed. The covering contains over 40 pockets that are meant to hold the plant materials gathered by the dress wearer. The skirt also acts as a shelter for camping in cooler weather and it also carries a portable Butane stove, pot and utensils for cooking the veggies. The piece was presented during the Canada Day festivities at the McMichael and animated by Lorraine Matheson Heidi, who interacted with visitors about the local edible plants in her dress.The NHD, animated by Nita Bowerman  was presented at the Sustenance Festival in Vancouver, where we made a soup with local vegetables and shared it with the public. Special thanks to Fred at the McMichael for teaching me about the local plants.

Nomadik Harvest Soup

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Lady Calla

Lady Calla HighLine

It was always my intention to do a street intervention with one of the dresses from the BBG gig and so i met with actor and playwright Miranda Huba and we developed a strategy for bringing Lady Calla to Manhattan. BBG supported this project by providing a small crew to document and deal with logistics. The aim was for Lady Calla to ask New Yorkers where she could find sustainable fashion. After interacting with garden visitors, she took the subway from Brooklyn to the Meat Packing District and then took a stroll down the new High Line Park. New Yorkers are bombarded with promotional gimmicks all the time and so they are quite jaded but we did manage to chat with people, who were not fazed by this woman dressed in live plants asking them where the best stores for sustainable products were. We went by some big designer stores like Alexander McQueen but the heavy security at the door kept us and our cameras out. Instead Madame Calla had fun interacting with the window displays. Many thanks to videographer Catherine Tyc for her support and Kate Blum for her boundless energy. As Miranda, Cat and i took the subway back to Brooklyn, i felt so fortunate to have teamed up with these talented women: Cat is working on a documentary called Swap about fashion and identity and Miranda wrote a play called House of Kosa which examines the intimate relationships within a fashion house.

Lady Calla in front of Alexander McQueem

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FASHIONALITY

FASHIONALITY, dress and identity in Contemporary Canadian Art

Fashionality is a new exhibition curated by Julia Pine at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection Gallery in Kleinburg Ontario. This exhibit features 23 Canadian artists who work with the theme of the garment. The show runs from May 5th to September 03, 2012 and the opening reception is on Sunday May 13. I will be showing photos of my IceShifts and my Weedrobes series, plus a new video on my work. I will also be doing an art residency at the McMichael from June 17th to July 1st. There i will create a new dress/tent called the Nomadik Harvest Dress which will culminate in a performance in the gallery and in the park. The gallery houses the largest collection of paintings by the Group of Seven, the iconic Canadian landscape painters and it is said that some of them are even buried in the park, so it is a great privilege for me to create there.

The artists are: KC Adams, Ingrid Bachmann, Lori Blondeau, Dana Claxton, Cathy Daley, Nicole Dextras, Aganetha Dyck, Jane Eccles, Gathie Falk, Farheen Haq, Barb Hunt, Michele Karch-Ackerman, Meryl McMaster, Kent Monkman, Janet Morton, Jacques Payette, Camal Pirbhai, Barbara Pratt, Ana Rewakowicz, Natalie Purschwitz, Jana Sterbak, Camille Turner, and Mary Sui Yee Wong. “Together, the assorted practical and conceptual approaches of these artists speak the common language of dress and, in the process, help to define just what it is that Canadian fashionality might be.” Julia Pine.

Read more in this Fashionality article

Laurel Suffragette

On the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery (surrealist show banner in background)

In September 2011, Laurel Suffragette was created  and conceived as a character coming from the late Victorian age, who had been active in the emancipation of women and the garment industry of her day, who had fought for reforms and safety in the manufacture area.  Miss Laurel Green-Fairfashion was curious to see how the future had turned out, so she  took a stroll down Robsonstrasse, Vancouver’s fashion district, to see what shoppers had to say regarding eco-fashion. The interventions varied from long one on one conversations, to people ignoring her because they suspected she was selling something, to having her picture taken with babies, to engaging store clerks. The most interesting was Laurel’s conversation about  jeans with an attentive American Eagle clerk, which was cordial until she asked if the company checks on their factory conditions at which point the store manager quickly ushered Laurel out.

Nita Bowerman‘s acting skills were perfect for this type of spontaneous street intervention and the fact that Nita -an artist in her own right who has an interest in the fashion industry- brings an extra level of commitment to the intervention. Apart from making the garment, I did a photo shoot outside the Vancouver Art Gallery , assisted by Jessica Beisler before we walked down Robson street. This site has been long been used as a gathering place for protests (most recently site of Occupy Vancouver) and it seemed a perfect location for a suffragette from the past to land in Vancouver. The makeup was by Keith Murray and  Michael Sider accompagnied us and videotaped the entire session. This footage will be edited into a Weedrobes video in the near future. It was my intention from the very  beginnings of the Weedrobes  project to take the outfits to the streets and i look forward to doing more next summer.

The dress was made from Laurel leaves pinned onto a framework made from bamboo seat caning. The mutton sleeves are based on the Keystone Jacket which was popular in the late Victorian age as a pattern for women to make their own clothing. The sleeves were covered with Hydrangeas and Baby’s Breath. The bodice was constructed from the bustier made for the Mobile Garden Dress, with a Jabot made from corn husks. The buttons were made from Cherry Tomatoes from my garden. The outfit was installed in my back yard for a few months and allowed to weather.

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