SPUR Project

2010 winner (14 of 19)

A sense of occasion: interrogating the narratives of real clothes

Supervisors: Kate Burnett (theatre Design), Deborah Tuck (Multimedia)

The project begins from a series of letters written by a woman in her 80s to her ill granddaughter in which she describes her youth in evacuation and subsequent journey to Malaysia as a young police wife in the early 1950s. The project, which will require the input of two students, is structured as an enquiry into the layered meanings of clothes and their conversion to costume through occasion and performance. One student will work with original dresses and fabrics from 1926 - 1976, creating patterns from them, researching period patterns and recreating garments from descriptions in interviews. A second student will film interviews between the project supervisor and the lady - Leslie Dorothea. This student will help to design the interview questions so that the answers can be catalogued and edited into short interactive bites to be exhibited. The student will also edit the filmed material, with intercut stills, into the bites.