Lodz Blouse Trilogy Details

‘Lodz Blouse Trilogy’ explores new thinking around inherited memory. It employs a historical photograph depicting a children’s tea party, taken by Henryk Ross, in the Jewish Lodz Ghetto, Poland (1942-45). The contemporary viewer is fully aware of the events that lay ahead for these individuals; Goldsmith uses the image as a universally understood symbol of innocence, suffering, a portal to our past and a direct link to the scientific theory which supports the piece. ‘Lodz Blouse Trilogy’ is distinctive in its innovative digital and analogue textiles skills. The installation utilises 3 ‘everyday’ pre-worn blouses developing Goldsmith’s investigation into dye-sublimation technology and digital embroidery on reclaimed garments. The wearing and circulation of my clothes, her mother’s, sister’s and her daughter’s is elemental in this work as is the evidencing of my own mother’s significant trauma and its subsequent transference to her children; what is passed down, transferred, inherited ? The research references the emergence of scientific findings to suggest there maybe a permeation of experience passed between mother and child - along with Rachel Yehuda’s hypothesis that trauma from the Holocaust is passed epigenetically to the children of those damaged. Both Boltanski and Bourgeois present worn clothing as prompts for personal and/or collective memory. I too, presents a distinct landscape for textiles, provoking new insights and cognisance of the clothes we wear, what of us is left behind in them and how can this be perceived, read and interpreted; the omnipresence of cloth and its mnemonic trace is key. The work aims to explicate narrative in worn clothing, illuminating the notion that experience can be passed between generations. Significant outcomes are substantiated by scientific knowledge and present opportunities both didactic and for personal insight/growth; pertinent to us all, the work asks what do we knowingly or unknowing carry with us ?