Growing Pains

“Growing Pains”, my final collection, came to fruition after turning to my old teenage journals for creative inspiration. I was fascinated with the scribbly and scrappy pages full of dramatic and angsty entries and it inspired me to become freer with my style of working and create organically on the stand. I reflected on some of my journal entries from when I participated in ballet competitions as a child and how different I am now from how I was then, and how children are often forced into gender-specific activities in an attempt to gain skills, despite not showing much interest in them. I found that Michael Clark’s collaboration with Bodymap was a huge inspiration in its similar influences and began to cut holes on the stand, much like his work, and thread other layers in and out of them, thus creating the fundamental textile techniques that ground the collection.