Suzanne Langston-Jones
I use dress empty of the human form as a vehicle for story telling. I am interested in the ghostly presence of an empty garment and the fragile memories and histories evoked by it and how the empty garment creates a haunting sense of the presence/absence of a wearer or a life/time past. To convey a sense of the fragility of time garments are constructed from transparent and semi-transparent fabrics, and layered together suspended in a gallery or site-specific space. Text is central to my work, especially the imagery of dress and dressmaking as recorded in fairytales. A story can inspire a new body of work or can be embroidered directly onto a garment, such as tiny black words sewn onto a pair of organza gloves to form the map of a life. For a little black dress a poem was embroidered onto a stiffened mull. The mull was cut away, leaving a fabric of lacy black words. (Images telling tales and wallflower). The work is labour intensive and I treat each piece I make as an haute couture garment, which becomes part of an imaginary magical wardrobe.