Collection Project, Patchwork Portrait

In this project, we were given a brief to pick a collection of items, an explore them as objects and also as a collection. I chose my wardrobe of clothes, as I am very interested in fashion and have a lot of clothes! I took all my clothes out of my wardrobe and started to experiment with them, categorizing them into different piles, playing with shapes and textures, and stacking them up at different levels. Experimenting with my clothes like this gave me a clearer picture of the different varieties of clothes I have, and how I use them to reflect my feelings.
I decided to focus on one element of my clothes, to explore it more fully, and I felt the variety of textures could best represent the amount of variety in my wardrobe, and also present the most opportunities for experimentation with ceramic materials. I impressed the fabrics into sheets of porcelain to make little 'swatches' of them, draping and folding them to make them resemble fabric more. I used porcelain to make sure that even the more subtle textures could be seen. I wanted to highlight the textures of the fabrics, so I used coloured glazes which I rubbed into all the creases, and splashed or pooled into some areas.
I bound the swatches together into a patchwork of porcelain sheets to display them together, as a sort of self portrait, and let the contrasts and similarities between the different experiments be seen more effectively.