Articles - 26 April 2007

The Space Between

Elizabeth Delfs is a Perth based emerging artist who recently held her first solo exhibition, The Space Between, in Melbourne as a part of the Cultural Program for the 2007 L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival.

A first solo show is an important step in the artists' career, so I was excited and nervous at the prospect of holding my first solo exhibition in Melbourne when I was invited to show during the L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival. The exhibition was held in the studios of HASSELL in Little Collins Street in Melbourne. HASSELL are an international multi-disciplinary design practice. I wanted to hold my show out of the gallery space as my work explores the relationship between garment and the built environment through textiles. I make 'object garments' which are viewed on the body through photographic stills or installed. Having exhibited in several group and joint shows in galleries, I was keen to view my work within a context that directly feeds into my practice, and excited about the potential dialogue that ensued.

The work vacillates between habitations and figurative sculpture - interests lie in the intersection between art, body and the built environment, which are applied through garment and textiles. The work primarily investigates notions of beauty: a resistance against the indoctrination of gender through contemporary fashion and the international media. The work proposes a fresh experience of beauty related to the difference and variety of human feeling and form. Once applied to the body the wearer is transformed into an agent of art, dress and architecture, whose principles are visual and intellectual, with abstractions of beauty, feeling and philosophy; blurring the boundaries between the body and the built environment. It asks how we may see ourselves as individuals wrapped in garments, and enveloped by buildings, while ultimately posing the question to the audience of the function of cloth and garment.

Challenging mainstream notions of garment and beauty I work specifically with unconventional materials, such as foam, fly wire and plastics; exploring the inherent properties of material and striking a balance between tradition and innovation. I seek to find innovative applications of material and their manipulation through traditional textile processes, such as dying, printing, smocking and cutting, creating structures which implode and explode, with transient visual qualities to be experienced from all angles. The language of garment is manipulated by using conventional fastenings such as buttons, zips and hooks, which connotes wearability. During the process of making there is a deliberatness in the manipulation of material, while at the same time allowing myself to be directed by the material. In doing so, shapes are created that at times spring organically outwards from a source, with little concern of the weight being distributed centrally or securely and when installed create a sense of unfamiliar sensuality. This method of working creates pieces that are irregular, while still achieving a delicate sense of equipoise, recalling the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi.

The garments created are all based on the circle, square and triangle, which are the universal symbols of beauty. These shapes are used as the basis of structures which denies the gendering of the garment, done traditionally through the structure of a garment in Western fashion. Through the rhythmic and repetitious use of cutting, smocking and printing, the material is manipulated to create a garment, that when applied to the body, or hung in site specific installation, echo architectural principles, redistribute bodily proportions and distort the silhouette, thus asking whose body may go beneath this?

I have also recently begun branding my objects with a "logoture", a combination of logo and signature, thereby refusing to label them exclusively as either art objects or couture.

Aesthetically and conceptually inspired by a well established movement of contemporary hybrid practice, I cite international artists and designers such as Issey Miyake, Caroline Broadhead, Maria Blaisse and Zaha Hadid as influences. The continuing development of this kind of hybrid practice where my work sits proves to be a rich terrain of critical engagement with textiles as a strategy for negotiating the built environment.

In terms of achieving my goals, the show was a great success as I sold work, had interest from a commercial gallery, and have an interesting potential collaboration with an international artist. The experience of holding a show during a festival is also a learning curve, one which you're not always sure in which direction it is going. The response I received about my work was very positive and encouraging.

Elizabeth Delfs
April, 2007

See also:   2007 Year of Design calendar