shirt 1 + shirt 2


Left: shirt 1, 2022. One secondhand polyester blend men’s dress shirt, thread. 43”x30”.
Right: shirt 2, 2022. One secondhand polyester blend men’s dress shirt, thread. 31”x40”.
Petroleum-based fibers used for garment construction today may never fully decompose, even if they are no longer recognizable as garments. I am approaching discarded garments by flattening them, “surveying” men’s dress shirts. Shirts come from a flat piece of fabric, and the fabric is cut into irregular shapes to create a garment that fits the body well. The precise contours that contemporary garments create are only widely available because producing excess fabric is so much less expensive now than it once was. In my process, I am re-flattening the shirts to create a continuous, mostly two-dimensional surface again. This process requires cutting them into smaller pieces, but like eroding plastic, they don’t go away completely.

