Thursday Eye Candy
Aso Ikele, Cloth used to protect the house by Victoria Udondian
Before studying painting, Victoria Udondian trained as a tailor and fashion designer. Her work today is informed by her interest in textiles, in the capacity of clothing to shape identity and the histories and tacit meanings woven into everyday materials.
In 2010, Udondian travelled to Dakar, Accra and Bamako researching the impact secondhand clothing has had on the West African textiles industry and on cultural identity. Interested in confronting notions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘cultural contamination’, Udondian tests conceptions of West African textiles against present and past realities, convinced ‘…that there exists some consequences on the perception of one’s identity when the language of the fabrics one wears is changed fundamentally.’
Aso Ikele (1948) made for We Face Forward takes the Whitworth’s textile collection as its starting point. The collection ranges from textiles made in Manchester for export to the West African market in the eighteenth century, to fabrics by contemporary makers in Mali who supply DKNY with hand-spun cotton.
Combining materials and narratives from Lagos and Manchester, Udondian weaves myths and histories into her own textiles, creating her own hybrids and questioning how stories become histories.
Read more here.
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