| 10 August 2020 |
Bin from my childhood home containing old towels and fabrics that were used as rags.
“There are years, days, hours, minutes, weeks, moments, and other measures of time spent in the production of ‘not writing’. Not writing is working, and when not working at paid work working at unpaid work like caring for others, and when not at unpaid work like caring, caring also for a human body, and when not caring for a human body many hours, weeks, years and other measures of time spent caring for the mind in a way like reading or learning and when not reading and learning also making things (like garments, food, plants, artworks, decorative items) and when not reading and learning and working and making and caring and worrying also politics, and…” From What is ‘Not Writing’ in Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer
| 12 August 2020 |
Liberating the fabric out of my Dad’s shirts that I saved after he passed away to make a quilt
“Lest I forget, though, that we also shed ourselves over time. This body is not the body it was then and is already becoming another body. This formula offers degrees of relief and panic in turn. It is also another kind of fiction. Suddenly I am aware of the body as both archive and archivist – in a crucial sense, it gathers its own materials. Control over the assemblage that I am turns out to be pure fantasy.” From No Archive Will Restore You by Julietta Singh
| 14 August 2020 |
Practicing some sewing techniques using my mother’s fashion file from college as reference.
“Time is my body, and it is also others’ bodies; it could next become sentences, and the reflexive pause within the phrase. This is grace, I think: the achievement, in the company of strangers, of the necessary precision of the pause. A sentence flourishes only as a pause in thought, which extends the invitation of an identification. The great amateurs of fashion understand this supple grace. Garments can translate a city, map a previously unimagined mode of freedom or consent. A garment is a pause in textile. The pause admits untimeliness.” From The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson
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Karen Kraven is a Montreal-based artist working with photography, sculpture and installation. Influenced by her father’s (and his father’s) knitting factory that stopped manufacturing the year she was born and by the physicality of textiles, her practice explores the ways clothing registers the body–how the body is unfinished, unstable and under interrogation–pointing to the sustained impact of work, wounds and wear.
Most recently, she has been working with off-cuts and scraps, as well as deconstructing and reconstructing unwearable garments. These works expose the vulnerability of grief, the resistance of the unfinished garment and the strength of their seams.
Intervals is a digital image commission that engages the in-between—intervening times, spaces, pauses, and breaks in activity—as taken up by artistic practice. Presented on the Mercer Union website and Instagram, this program invites artists to consider their experience of temporality through its disruption, and the sense of before, during, and after that is punctuated in the process of reflection.
Intervals is made possible with Support from Partners in Art.
