“How can our perception about clothing and furniture be transformed through challenging and comparing the disciplines to breed a new object category?”

Both furniture and clothing mediate the body in its environment, albeit through different levels of intimacy and mobility. In my current project, Wearing Chairs While Sitting On Pants, I question the constraints of these assumptions by exploring the seam between the categories of furniture and clothing, with the intention of more deliberately activating a new object category in that between-space.

Fueled by my own passion for clothing and my eagerness to make furniture-like clothing, this collection is a platform of experimentation. Through synthesising and juxtaposing existing forms, functions and materials of the furniture/clothing divide, these objects are questions rather than declarative statements.

How does engaging with an object that is propositional, rather than conforming, activate the participant’s imagination? I would like these liminal pieces to provoke the audience to (re)consider their current views on how clothing and furniture function in relationship to their own bodies, spaces, and lives. Are new words, functions or aesthetic values generated? And more expansively, how might the blurring or recasting of this boundary suggest the productive rethinking of other object categories?

(Text : Linda Swanson)