Cloth and memory: transitions

The idea behind my installation for the Cloth and memory exhibition, to be held at Salts Mill over the summer, is that the windows are gradually being blocked up trapping the inhabitant of the room. So each window has to show a progression from the one before it. When I first saw the room my work is being exhibited in, the third window was blocked up by thick card so I decided to use cardboard as a backing for that window. Therefore the first window has a net curtain hanging at it, the second window has a net curtain with card backing behind the lower half suggesting it is being turned to stone and the third window is mainly cardboard with the remains of the curtain on it as you can see here.

I started by applying the cloth to the cardboard but realised that the join between the two had to be more subtle and suggest that the cloth was becoming part of the fabric of the building. I then set about distressing the cloth with scissors and a blade – not as easy as you might think because the pins kept pinging out of the cloth and I had to keep searching for them, then finding where they’d come from and replacing them. When I thought the cloth was distressed enough I glued it to the card and then added some tallies to the bare card to fill the remainder of the window. The idea being that the tallies metamorphose from pins to marks on the card, then to marks on the bricks of the building, and finally in the last window they disappear completely as they have been absorbed into the fabric of the building.