Fabric

I'm wearing pyjamas my sister made

Light blue gingham cotton, crocheted lace running the edges

This used to be a garment for elsewhere (too airy for London, saved for summers in Asia)

Now it's the only thing I can bear under the fan, in a European summer gone apocalyptic

Gingham is domesticity to me

a blonde wife in an apron, lemon meringue cooling, a checked cloth on the table.

Cosiness borrowed from someone else's

I first saw Hansol's work ten years ago

He built wearable furniture from florals (apparently the most common pattern in the domestic interior)

He said he was introverted, and wanted to feel at home outside his home

he cross-breeds two object-species that were never meant to meet.

Ask him how you could possibly compare an apple and a bicycle, and he will simply find a way to breed them

The couplings look like a bad joke, an arbitrary matchmaking.

But the joke is a curiosity about how objects get sorted a desire to imagine species that don't yet exist

The spiral

Once, at the British Museum, I stood over Chinese ceramics from the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

They look like European pasta bowls, I said.

The person beside me, who knew Chinese history, told me the European bowls were inspired from the Chinese ceramics

You walk along the line thinking it runs forward

Then it smacks you from behind, and you see the line was a spiral all along.


Origins

Looking up how to spell gingham

From those unreliable depths, two origin stories surface

Gingham comes from the Malay genggang (striped) and travelled out through Dutch colonial hands

Traces of it turn up across India, Indonesia, South and Southeast Asia Western domestic life