Blueprint for a party dress responds to my fetish for collecting fashion garments and memories of playing dress-up in my aunts and mothers debutante dresses from the 1950’s as a young child. 

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This exhibition forms part of my honours exegesis at CDU, where I explore the processes of selecting; collecting; abstracting; and deconstructing within my creative practice. The sourcing of fashion garments has become a systematic interplay with my collecting impulse. Where now the fashion garment is elevated to souvenir status, reliant on me as its possessor to make it visible, by applying narrative, meaning and context.  

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Blueprint for a party dress explores the fashion garment as souvenir, investigating its movement across time and space and how those movements in-turn move us.

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The production of these works begins with translating my collection of antique dresses through Cyanotype - an alternative photographic process. The original dress acts as a photographic negative, producing a copy of the original dress. This copy then goes through a process of deconstruction, where warp and weft threads are interrupted with a quick unpicking tool. Faultlines and ladders emerge, evolving purpose, context and meaning of the dress but at the same time keeping its corporeal presence. 

 

Image: Jane Anderson, Victoria & Vivienne, 2020, cyanotype on linen. Photo: Fiona Morrison.