Cuh Opilamonnia Rs: Blanket Critique

Composition: credit to Atlus for persona 4 golden intro cutscene ps vita screenshot and Katya Freydina for modelling, other images consist of personal photography from hanger lane tube station and an Ethel Cain concert captured on ps vita.

There is a lot I want out of my art and all of it feels contradictory and overwhelming. Working from music, cinema, the post-impressionist movement, modernist, post-modernist, meta-modernist theories and much more. I’m not confident that I covered all these subjects in the detail that they deserve individually though I stand by the finished product. This isn’t an exercise in retroactively justifying any shortcomings in technical execution or theory. Design decisions in most cases were sporadically led by emotion and thoughts about people and situations happening at the time. Those people, situations and actively acknowledging time in this project created a narrative. A narrative that I believe contributes to a framework which uses the unique qualities of hand embroidery to communicate an artist's identity effectively. 

Taking a step back to look at everything, my drive towards using meta-modernist theory stemmed from an understanding that it justified my hectic research schematics. The idea of an oscillation between modernism and postmodernism is intriguing for the precedent it can set in visual and material art. Quite literally exploring multiple themes like album covers alongside lighting in movie screencaps, specific considerations from different disciplines. Sometimes contradictory thoughts of both minimalism and maximalism are in opposition simultaneously. All of this to create a final product, a garment, which I think doesn't exactly correlate to the typical application of meta-modernism which would be analysis, critique and interpretation of reality, culture, art, and media. Quite different from using the theory behind it to actualise a physical piece of art or craft. It's most likely why I found so many roadblocks throughout this project. I feel like there is a lot that can be taken and used to contribute to embroidery practice, and I could argue in quite a unique way. I cannot comment on the world of meta-modern literature as it is unknown to me currently but from the things I've read about architecture and personal experience I feel that a lot of art is concerned with the result, the final visual qualities that exhibit the theories they explore. It's certainly what I focused on whilst working on Cuh Opilamonnia Rs.

 

Fashion is a world of results and final pieces, haute couture and everyday clothing famously avoid the uncomfortable history of who made your clothes, and the plethora of people who work on fashion week after fashion week hardly get recognition for their work embroidering on garments. Whether they want recognition is irrelevant to a certain extent, it would set a beneficial precedent that could speculatively trickle down the fashion chain and force companies to name those who work on their products. Transparency in how things are created, a little bit of what I’m trying to do here. Dismantling why I disagree with how embroidery is being practised feels uncomfortable because it is way too big of a thing to possibly propose a solution for in this blog entry. Meta-modernist theory could very well contribute to a solution but never by itself. My garment is hardly perfect in transparency, the references to people who made it possible are usually abstract, albeit intentionally, or completely missing from forgetfulness. Aspects of the design that I might have changed in retrospect. 

 

Any lapses in execution can’t justify a disregard for a result-led artistic framework. Funnily enough, because it's personally difficult to call anything of mine ever complete, I could have an argument with myself forever trying to justify my work as satisfactory in completeness. Whether any of my internal monologue matters to you, the reader, depends on how much we value artistic intent but that's something I want to go over in another entry. 

Embroidery thrives off the process of practising it as much as it does from its result. It's decorative, usually the first thing you see, on fashion, upholstery, and fine art pieces. Almost visually inescapable as it almost always sits on top. It doesn't however feel like there's been an equal amount of support for modern, new and interesting ways of exploring the process of ‘making’ that extends to the same heights of haute couture or mainstream attention. From embroidery as therapy for soldiers recovering from World War 1 & 2 to the current mending and slow stitching take place as a reaction to overconsumption of late-stage capitalism. Those and more are all fascinating aspects of embroidery that apply to its process, but I feel are relegated to the domestic or ‘craft’ side of it. Craft is always compared to Art and many institutions label it the former for a variety of reasons, some that I'm confident in calling exploitative. Are the people working on embroidery for garments during fashion week considered artists when they're stitching to specifications designated by the designer(s)? Or would the companies that employ them regard them as doing craft work since little to none of their artistic intent is injected into the result? Attributing it all to a team of designers or a single creative director of a brand seems like it would only benefit a company under the existing long history of fashion under capitalism. I unfortunately don't have statistics to prove that is the case so I wouldn't call myself extremely reliable here, hence the conspiring but the existing creative structures uphold quite regularly the monetary and business side of distributing art rather than focusing on its purely creative possibilities. My priorities focus on intensifying the creative freedoms of myself and those around me, perhaps missing out on the priorities that a large company may possess. 



Adopting the practices of gift economies to distribute embroidery without expecting reimbursement can very well remove it from the current system. My final garment is priced at around £10,000 to £14,000 under the calculations for time spent making, material cost etc but I very much doubt anyone is going to purchase it, it would be a luxury good. If anyone did, then how far disconnected am I from them. I wouldn’t buy my work for that much, I don’t have that much money, so if someone else did what kind of relationship I would have with them. Some would consider these considerations outside the scope of what should bother me, but I care about my relationships massively sometimes obsessively. Communication is art and the basis of my art is that I want to communicate with people so perhaps I should just give my work to one of my friends who inspired it. Or to someone I barely know or recently met that I feel like I could have a relationship with and that I want to see more of. Wouldn’t this be a strong expression of artistic intent that extends far out from the final stitch and into the later life of the art? Applying this generally, not everyone’s art is based on their experiences nor is something they want to give away for free. Money is important for artists, and it is for me as well. It just feels like it has no part in how fulfilled I feel in the making and result of my embroidery therefore it all feels somewhat inconclusive. A gimmicky approach should be avoided, it needs to be from the heart and sincere if it is to be taken seriously. 

 

The process of creating embroidery influenced by meta-modernism has led to the outcome of Cuh Opilamonnia Rs, the print of the entire garment is completely independent from the embroidery as it was not designed to be embroidered on, as well as extremely led by the embroidery on it. Embroidery yields to the colours and composition of the print in some areas and overpowers in others. The placement of those areas is decided by a combination of the current time of making in the project, awareness of where internal organs are positioned against the fabric, and where embroidery would best be suited for weight during movement. Attributing sincerity to some colours and scepticism to some shapes. The title of this project represents things vibrantly, digital and biological self-made symbols of creation and destruction sandwiched between an anagram that appears in an Ethel Cain lyric video spelling out ‘crush’, doing the opposite of crushing: holding things together.

Vermeulen, T. and van den Akker, R. (2010) ‘Notes on metamodernism’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2(1). 

Royal School of Needlework (2022) ‘Cushion’, Col.2022.50, RSN 2678, 1940s Last Access: 17/12/2024 https://collections.royal-needlework.org.uk/object-col-2022-50

Parker, R. (1984). The subversive stitch : embroidery and the making of the feminine. London: Women’s Press.

Karen van de Berg (2013) Last Exit Underclass / Music, Notes on Metamodernism https://www.metamodernism.com/2013/05/01/last-exit-underclass/

Cuh Opilamonnia Rs: but bird is funny

 

Image Credit: Marceli Klimek, Konrad Kozaczek, Katya Freydina

Many of the ideas I put forward for Cuh Opilamonnia Rs were abstract and broad. I want to go into them specifically in future entries in this blog. This is somewhat backwards to how I should talk about this project because this entry is me reviewing my thought processes with information that you, the reader, might not be privy to. Now that this project is complete, there are many things I want to build on because a lot of the beliefs I made my design decisions on were tied to my life and personal experiences. These have proven to evolve since and deserve a resolution or alternate take. So much was everywhere and now I want to limit and contain it.

Making this project for a friend, for someone, communicating person to person. Art that excludes a majority audience to prioritise an individual can be for someone the artist knows superficially like a celebrity or a close friend or family member. With the former, true communication involving two parties or more doesn’t get taken advantage of. Your work connects with like-minded people who see the other party from your perspective either with the same level of knowledge about them or less. 

The way I understand it, this system allows for embroidery, specifically fashion, to be widely marketable to a demographic that likes a specific “subject,” and specific design choices are made or accepted to enable this. It’s a system that works, but other focused and unexplored relationship dynamics could work, too.

An attempt at working with this structure and incorporating new ideas meant that I went along with what I intended whilst employing design decisions within colour, texture and composition that I understood as monetarily popular and beneficial. In the spirit of Metamodernism, the metaphor of a pendulum swinging from one extreme of a concept to the other continuously. It would be nice to say I achieved this but I find it hard to prove that I did. I can prove that I wholeheartedly aimed my work at a singular individual with strong emotional bonds to me but not so much if a wide variety of people also enjoyed and understood my work. Success isn't guaranteed, so does the intent count? What is success measured by? My work has helped me understand my emotional bonds with people who are the subjects of this embroidery. There are a lot of opinions I'm not privy to either, from academic individuals as well as strangers and my contemporaries funnily enough because I have yet to explain this project properly to anyone in detail. A lot of things regarding this project worry me, it might be best to share and communicate them here. 

Communication is the groundwork for Cuh Opilamonnia Rs and it will be greatly expanded on in the realm of artist intent and reception. 

What I want to do now is to attempt to capture a different rhythm from the aforementioned pendulum. A smaller canvas, a t-shirt, simpler and planer with extremely dense and compact embroidery, opposite to the Cuh Opilamonnia Rs Over Coat but containing the same concepts and concentration of ideas. I feel that this encore of an outcome could reconcile some of the ideas communicating them once more, not as a replacement to the original but as an example of the endless variations a single project can contain and produce.