UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE?
Universal Language? is an on-going body of research surrounding our human relationships with woven fabric. It aims to explore cloth as the boundary between the self and the other and the self and our environment; cloth as an unspoken connection between us all and a ‘silent witness to the routines of our everyday lives’1 . With explorations surrounding our sensory experiences, its social value, and cloth as performative, this work aims to demonstrate the mode of human togetherness, plurality of voices and intimate affiliations exhibited through the 'universality' and commonality of cloth. The ubiquity of woven fabric appears to result in its invisibility, and with this in mind, this project aims to pull cloth out from the shadows by exploring how it unequivocally shapes the world we live in and how we live within it.
1 Textures of Memory, the Poetics of Cloth (Johnson, 1999)