an ode to calico

I went to buy cloth this week, to make a mock-up of our costumes and my thoughts darted around the shop, coming to rest on different bolts of cloth:

pink cotton – mum made me the first and only pink dress I ever wore when I was 5

coloured fleece – I wore tracky-dacks until I was 14 because they were comfortable, and that’s all that mattered

denim – my debut into the realm of cool was a pair of denim overalls (when different things mattered)

tulle – I’d never get married

calico – curtains in the house where I grew up –  wait.

I’d been looking for calico. It’s plain and simple material – upon which anything could be projected, out of which anything could be created and represented…that’s what cloth does, doesn’t it? It broadcasts our differences, our similarities, our tastes, our insecurities, our roles, our battles, our status…to varying degrees of accuracy – focus.

Calico. How much did I need again? –is calico really that simple? I went to a naked tour of an exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art a few months ago, led by Stuart Ringholt. Naked in the sense that he had no clothes on and neither did we. His point in setting these conditions was to remove all material barriers between the audience and the artwork. He argued that all material, including clothing, is a culmination of complex processes of creation and to have this present in a gallery detracts from the creative complexity that has gone into the artwork.  Given that I spent more time looking at the interesting bodies in the room than the artwork, I don’t know if his conditions had the desired effect (or maybe I’m just a pervert). He did make an interesting point though, about the complexity of cloth itself, which seems to get overlooked…

… in particular by those who ruminate excessively over what cloth represents. Five metres of not-so-simple calico went into my bag and home to the sewing machine…

(naomi francis)