Agnes & Karl
I heard a story that the last objects in the Hallwyl collection to be catalogued were the work coats worn by those doing the cataloguing. These coats are filed as “Tools etc. for the collection”, a curious and inspirational categorization: if a tool is an instrument used to perform a task, what is the function of these garments now? What do they enable us to do and what might they tell us?
When I met the garments in real life I understood things I would never have been able to grasp from the description or photographs in the catalogue alone: the texture of the fabric, the seams that give a clue to construction, the physicality of employees Agnes Carlsson and Karl Andersson even though they left us a long time ago.
I spent a lot of time looking in the photographic catalogues at forms and patterns to re-draw. Their traces find their way on to these re–imagined garments. This work is an exercise in learning from objects, whether in my developing skills in clothes–making, or the physical copying of the painted decoration on a broken tile by craftspeople unknown, or in what the coats themselves might reveal about their previous wearer. Clothes as tools and archival traces / tracing of previous lives.