BRIC-A-BRAC BEAUTY
Summer is the time full of festivals, friends and playing around in the sunshine. Today we’re looking back to the Pop issue of Selvedge, where we featured the work of Nick Cave – one of America’s most playful and inspiring designers – whose other-worldly Soundsuits merge all of the best parts of art, craft and play…
There is something of the anancy (a vital character in West African folklore) in Nick Cave. His seductive and deceptively playful pieces pay no attention to the boundaries between fine and applied art, high and low culture, gendered and racial identity, let alone fashion, textiles and craft. Instead their drama and sheer tactility arrests you. The bits-and-piecesness of his wearable sculptures spring to life through movement. Each Soundsuit is sewn together from found materials – doilies, buttons, beads, fake flowers, bric-a-brac and scraps of fabric. Cave’s use of cast-offs and near obsolete craft practices is a powerful metaphor for those whom society discards.
Cave takes an improvisational approach to making – choosing not to sketch things out, preferring instead to allow each Soundsuit to evolve. The pieces morph again when worn. As in ceremonial masquerade, the body is completely masked. This provides a powerful means of self-reflection, self-expression and liberation from the perspective of the wearer. For the viewer, the Soundsuits inspire new ways of thinking about themselves, others and their environments. By hiding gender, race and class, Cave forces us to look without judgment. The wearing, performance and viewing of the suit all become one transformative act.
Cave’s practice encompasses two genres: ‘suits’ and found object sculptures. He creates in a hybrid space where there is familiarity yet unfamiliarity; there is a familiarity to the objects selected but they become unfamiliar through his interventions. His aim, as he explains in the monologue below, is to use his practice as a ‘vehicle for change’.
‘It starts with an object. I think that the object is an instigator. Can it provide a different meaning? That’s the negotiation. There’s a pulse within an object. We have to continue to nurture, to be out in the world recognising, feeling, responding to things. What’s the origin of the object? What’s its original function? Is that significant? How and why is the function relevant? Should I reconsider it?’...
An extract from Cultural Threads: transnational textiles today, edited by Jessica Hemmings. You can read this article in full in Selvedge issue 65. Order your copy here.