Walking into Bree’s apartment, the first thing you’ll notice is the furniture pushed to the side in the living room so that she can lay her giant patchwork quilt on the floor. Her thoughtful nature means that all of her things have a story, from the handmade mug she is drinking from to the clothing that she wears.
Written and Photographed by Emily Neill
Lets start with talking about what are you working on right now.
Right now I am creating quilts from 100% natural, 100% recycled materials for a large private commission. Recently I hand-stitched drawings of local flora and fauna onto denim garments for Peggy Sue Collection‘s award-winning runway show. In my personal practice I am always creating hand-knitted garments for myself, friends and family, as well as performing various textile experiments in natural dyeing, weaving, sewing, knitting, mending, quilting, drawing, etc . I worked on a farm last year to better understand the processes that wool goes through in order to be transformed from a sheep’s back into a finished garment.
What type of work do you create?
I have a background in fine arts and did my undergrad at ACAD in drawing, which always underlies my practice. I am often sketching people walking by outside the window and I have made several quilts with drawings on them. During my MFA at NSCAD I was working with sculpture and found post graduation that I needed to change my practice to be a little more home friendly as I no longer had a big studio I could get messy in. So the switch to textiles was a natural one as I had grown up sewing and had taught myself knitting gradually over the previous five years. Now I create many projects that I consider to be situated at different points along the spectrum of practical everyday items (hand-knitted socks) to artworks (my project Kids Fix Broken Stuff for example)
I love the way you’ve documented your wardrobe on your website. Where and when did your zero harm wardrobe journey start for you?
I was feeling down on myself that I wasn’t making enough “art” and “only” doing all this practical stuff when I realized that I could reframe the creation and maintenance of my clothing as an artwork as well. I realized that the practice of caring for a sustainable wardrobe over a lifetime could be presented as a time based work that involves themes of labour, the value of the handmade, resistance to disposable culture and to capitalism, minimalism, gendered work, etc. Inspiration on this front would come from projects like Andrea Zittel’s Smocks where a limit is turned into a creative challenge. Fixing what’s broken is a metaphor that I have used a lot in my artwork, and a carefully darned sock can definitely be a beautiful work of art.
Why does this matter to you?
I am horrified by the consequences of western consumption and I feel that the need to buy something is very often an emotional rather than a practical need. For myself I found that these feelings can easily be replaced with the equally satisfying experience of creating something or altering something. When we feel empowered to create and change our wardrobes ourselves we have a different, more invested relationship to those objects and are not as likely to throw them in a landfill. There is also a transformational aspect in the way we feel about our clothes on a deeper level – something I buy in a store to look good for the male gaze or whatever has shifted slightly into something that has come from myself, it is my own creation and there’s a type of love there that has nothing to do with how others see you. So in a teenyway for me I feel like it shifts my relationship to the beauty standards that drive especially women to constant consumption.
You have some beautiful mending work. Can you tell me more about mending?
Mending is so key and I feel like so many people do not feel empowered to fix the wear and tear they experience on their clothing, so it gets discarded after one rip. It really can be simple! Get some friends and some instructional youtube videos and have yourself a mending party! Most of the mending I do is invisible but for a knee patch or a blown out heel on a sock I like to take my time and make a bit of an artwork out of it with different colours and textures. I am inspired by Japanese Boro and sashiko stitches and love that the lines are really a type of drawing. For the Peggy Sue Collection I mended upcycled denim and was able to actually draw local plants and animals with the thread onto the patches. Mending our clothes can also be seen as a metaphor for all the mending we have to do on the planet to heal the devastation that has resulted from unsustainable consumption. Small actions do add up to big movements that can have far reaching impact.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Bree!
Visit Bree’s website.