Charlotte Makes Photos

For the last month or so, Kathleen and I have been trying to get out more often and do more things. Part of this is because of the stirring and brilliant insight that doing things is fun! You don’t have to stay inside or around your home.

Between COVID and my own entry into the club of being Middle-Aged, I think that it becomes easy to shrink your world and with both of our personalities, it was easy to become somewhat doctrinaire about things like mealtimes and bedtime. Before you know it, life seems like it has so little to offer.

Of course, it would seem that way when you’re up at 5am and in bed to read by 8pm. Our window of waking hours has been two, perhaps three, time zones ahead of most of life in Ottawa. As if our bodies are somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland. It turns out that when you’re not gearing down for your evening routine at 6pm, there can be a lot to do.

In our case, this past Tuesday meant that we would attend a sort work hybrid workshop and exhibition put on by Carleton University’s Urban Imaginaries Lab. Titled Beyond The Wardrobe, the event — which was held at Arlington 5 between 6:30 and 8:30pm — was described as:

What if clothing could be more than something we buy, wear, and eventually discard?

How might we relate differently to the clothes we own, the materials they are made from, and the resources they require? What possibilities emerge when garments are designed to remain open, adaptable, repairable, and unfinished?

To explore these questions, Carleton University researcher and Associate Professor Chiara Del Gaudio, together with research assistant Raven Lafleur-Scharf, invites you to Beyond the Wardrobe, a community exhibition and public engagement event presenting the outcomes of an ongoing research project on sustainable fashion, transgressive design, and alternative ways of relating to clothing.

The exhibition features a collection of experimental garments and textile interventions developed through research-through-design and participatory design processes. The pieces explore repair, adaptation, reconfiguration, and incompleteness as ways of questioning common assumptions about clothing, consumption, care, and sustainability.

Although it was somewhat crowded in the small venue and often difficult to really take in and consider the exhibits (not to mention, I was coming just after my weekly electro appointment¹), we enjoyed ourselves and Kathleen, who is concerned about sustainability in fashion and her sewing, had many thoughts, which we discussed on the way home.

1. We’re back to a second pass on my neck, which is more painful and host to stubborn hairs. I tend to remain red and swollen longer when working there. ↩︎