I went to see Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Beauty in the Barbican a few months ago and have since become obsessed with the principle of wabi sabi! I'm trying to keep the key elements of it's principle of modesty and impermanence flowing through my work.
Impermanence is something I've been interested in for a long time, from my own personal experience. The way that a body decomposes; it's never permanent. Locks of hair, a tooth, a nail clipping - all traces of the body which now, doesn't exist. I want to explore this idea of impermanence through the manipulation of textiles. Clothing and other textile objects are often held onto after a person dies, and it's this idea of preservation of a physicality that inspires me. Even such intimate things as a hair become precious relics, which would normally be quite abject in terms of our reactions to finding a hair on for example, clothing or bedding.
On a much larger and more dramatically devastating scale, such tragic events as the tsunami in Japan offer elements of impermanence. I was horrified at the way that buildings - whole towns - that seems so permanent, so there could be wiped away, leaving nothing but the haunting residue of the lives lived before.
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