Portrait of a Marriage

Conscious and unconscious memory is activated by our associations with cloth, stirring our senses and emotions. ‘Portrait of a Marriage’ is a textile assemblage book within which a poem reveals the intimate emotions and thoughts that textiles evoke. This oeuvre references the textile books of Louise Bourgeois. 

I awaken to the scent of your body

in the sheets and your pillow

in the clothes you wore  yesterday

still unwashed.

My hand caresses the creases

of where you lay

I inhale slowly and deeply 

absorbing the redolence

that still summons my love.

I sort through your clothes

where your absent body still resides

in the stains and in the folds

in the way your elbows and knees

have shaped them.

I leave them there, absented

your body still lingering

longing that once again

you  will inhabit them.

molecules and cells

imbedded between the threads

are all I have of you

now

Co. 2019 Line Dufour

Branded

Branded.

51cm x 47cm. cotton canvas, garment and domestic textile tags. machine stitched, embroidered.

2019

Though garments and household textiles we purchase may be recyclable and environmentally sustainable, the tags attached to them are not. Many rank others according to the fashion brands they purchase and acquire. This is an assemblage of people with small budgets and no extra money for the luxuries of designer products.

Threadbare

Diana Scott participated in the community component of Worn Worlds installation.  The absence of maternal love and affection in her life was revealed as she shared the story of her 1927 Patsy Ann doll. The many outfits made for this doll outlived Diana's mother and Grandmother, but not Diana's pain from the absence of love and affection towards her as a child.  The years fray and deconstruct the  dress as it does the toxic hold these unloving relationships had upon us.

Rhythms of Daily Life

Referencing Louise Bourgeois' textile works, and finding from them a source of inspiration, I played with useful textiles through the lens of art, and the eyes of an artist. It alludes to the repetitiveness of our daily domestic tasks. 

At Loose Ends

At Loose Ends

a series of textile sketches. Dryer sheets, denim work pants, cheesecloth, 
machine stitched, hand mended.

28cm x 21.5cm.

years fray my edges
wear me out in places
each thread pulling away
undoing the fabric of my life
time ripping and shredding
each thread a moment
a memory , an experience
an emotion, a parting
an anger, a tenderness
a resentment, a kindness
these threads woven together
the warp and weft of what I was
and am no longer
now that time has
unravelled

copyright Line Dufour 2019

Landscapes

Our personal narratives are pieced together by fragments of our past including the textiles that have accompanied us along the journey, imbuing them with memory and feelings. Embedded in cloth are our stories, our histories, our identities and our cultures.  Cloth arouses thoughts of warmth, comfort, protection and intimacy but also paradoxically, confinement, containment, fragility, and impermanence.  So much of women’s labour is invisible, impermanent and unseen. Domestic work is consumed, disintegrates, dissolves, disappears, is forgotten, is invisible…so many of these hours regarded as insignificant and inconsequential.

Landscapes (below) consists of four textile assemblages that paint the canvas of a domestic life.  Constructed of textiles collected over the duration of the artist’s life, these ‘Landscapes’ utilize everyday and mundane textiles that are part of domestic chores - endless menial tasks most often done without remuneration or praise, often not seen by others, and usually only noticed by a small and intimate circle. These textiles are silent witnesses, archaeological evidence of a life and its relationships. Each piece takes years to create and has left these markings ꟷ the wearing, the fraying, the stains and the rips. These ‘landscapes’ are the art that forms an ordinary life.

The Terrain Travelled: linen dishcloth, vintage flour bag, denim construction work pants, 'art' class apron, Queen of Hearts playing card: stitched

The Daily Terrain of Living. 101cm x 81cm. cotton, denim, dryer sheets, clothing tags. upcycled fabrics

2019

The Landscape of Everyday,  104cm x 78cm. Linen, cotton, denim, found objects. upcycled textiles. 2019

Dream Fields   86cm x 79cm. cotton pillowcase and bed sheet, dryer sheet, plastic netting, window screening, garment tag. 2019. 

Landscapes is attached with clothespeg to a clothesline. The clothespegs have a line of poetry written on each of them. Below, the pegs, along with the poem. 

Cloth accompanied

ordinary moments

of domesticity

ART of my life

these markings

Years disintegrate

my labours

stains

rips

frays

evidence of a life

Finding the Words

Finding the Words. 101cm x 65cm. Dryer sheets, transfer, cotton cheesecloth. Handstitched, embroidered
2019

The various roles society demands that women assume create fragmentation and division of self. In women’s roles as mother, sister, aunt, daughter, friend, professional, employee, employer, it often seems that too many people want pieces of you, demand more of you than you can give. All this creates a disconnect with the self and threatens well-being and wholeness.
With each art work created is an entry point into myself, uncovering me and making myself visible to others. This is especially true of Finding the Words, where my full-length portrait is curtained by the text and painting, nebulous and numinous. My silent voice makes itself heard. Text plays a more prominent role in my life, at times appearing to eclipse the visual art I am creating. The textile collage mirrors how words and images shape my thinking process. Slowly they emerge to form strands of words that are then stitched into a cohesive whole. My artistic process parallels my awkward, tedious and meticulous writing journey. Each word is carefully examined for flaws and tested for its quality and authenticity.

Finding the Words (poem)

I vanish between the spaces of the words

I disappear into the blanks

I recede into the silences

I can only find my creativity in the quiet places

I live in the place where there are no words

fueled only by the quiet

punctuated by various sounds

in this space 

my awareness wanders 

into nooks and crannies

of  ideas and thoughts

into  memory and emotion

where love is stored

Each word that comes to me a pearl

formed in the shell of my silence

and like the pearl

clear luminescent smooth and hard

each word a bead strung upon a strand

to make me whole

© Line Dufour 2019

Worn Worlds: Community Participation Component - Introduction

Clothes are our autobiography and our identity. Through them, we “can trace the connections of love across the boundaries of absence, and  of death, because cloth is able to carry the absent body, memory, genealogy, as well as” the characteristics of its materiality.

In his article Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things, Peter Stallybrass tells us he lost his friend Allon White to cancer. When Allon died, Stallybrass came into possession of Allon’s favourite jacket. Stallybrass wore it to a presentation where suddenly, he was overcome with emotion and could not continue. He  recalls,
“…I was inhabited by his presence, taken over…..he was there in the wrinkles of the elbows, which in the technical jargon of sewing are called ‘memory’.  He was there in the stains at the very bottom of the jacket….above all, he was there in the smell”.

Susan Avishai: My Father's Leather Jacket

He goes on to tell us that clothes and textiles that are part of our everyday life, receive us and yield to our shape, absorb our odours, scents and perspiration, wearing in the places where our bodies exert more friction. When parents, children, close friends, and lovers die, their clothes still hang in their closet “holding their gestures, both reassuring and terrifying, touching the living with the dead.”

Meru Parmar: Woven Wedding Saris with gold and silver threads

Textiles are witnesses and recorders of our daily lives. Our skin, the food we eat and other particles become imbedded within the intersections of the threads. They absorb scents from our immediate environment and those that emanate from our bodies. Our fingers recall their feel,  surfaces, textures, and materiality. The sensors in our fingers like threads dressed on the loom of our mind, unspool our feelings and our re-memorying of a person or events. 

Carolyn Barnett: My Mother's Horruckses Dress


EVERY GARMENT TELLS A STORY

Every garment tells a story

about the person who made it

whose hands have touched it

fingers caressing

a body it enveloped

in comfort 

or adorned 

the persons who sold it and disposed of it. 

every garment tells a story 

about the person who wears it

each day and the event it was worn for

stories for the adventures they accompanied us on

stories of the people met while wearing them

stories of the relationships that they witnessed.

and when the person who once inhabited the garment does so no longer

the garment remains 

storing  these silent stories

each stain, each rip, each frayed seam

commemorating like a marker

our memories  

their only inhabitants 

Line Dufour ©2019