“The pieces in this collection allow the wearer to escape within themselves, be succumbed by the regenerated materials, comforted by their surroundings, allowing their personal space to be the catalyst for their recovery.”

The individual and collective experiences of humanity are what create the complex and convoluted modern world we find ourselves operating within. Regardless of our place in society, there are core emotions and situations we all experience that connect us within individual cultures. I am categorising these experiences into three stages of human existence: birth, life and death. All are intertwined. However, the impact and ritualism associated with death are something I have found myself particularly enamoured by. The collection highlights the importance of personal experience and emotion, looking in depth at the way we as a society have attempted to institutionalise and preside over human grief and mourning. I found this most prominent in western society, where the process surrounding death is mostly seen as something deeply revered and removed from life, respected as something other, seemingly beyond the understanding of those left behind. This mystique is, of course, perpetuated by religious institutions, specifically the catholic church. In regards to the societal relevance of these principles, I found itimportant to do further analysis on the concept of sectionalism. Not just its religious connotation but also as a broader way of conducting human affairs and behaviour based on the ideologies and principles of the governing bodies.

When looking into how mourning and grief appears within my immediate community, I reflected on a memorial on the side of the road I had seen recently. Filled with flowers and letters of grieving family and friends, what could have been a macabre yet beautiful scene of life and joy, had instead been left neglected and allowed to decay. A sea of wrinkled and distorted flowers, in a haunting arrangement of beige, browns, whites and dull pinks. Something that was once intended to represent the memory and life left after death, has now succumbed itself to the factuality of the same process it aimed to contrast. This display of grief and mourning led me to reflect on the immediate human reaction to follow the processes of death and funeral etiquette, such as putting out flowers or wearing all black, as a means to mask ones true capability of dealing with something so monumental as the death of a loved one. As humans, we should not simply follow one formula for how we conduct our lives, how we choose to mourn, to love, to celebrate should be an incredibly personal and intimate act, as opposed to something historically established based off patriarchal and in most cases religious values, which is not a true or accurate representation of how modern humanity functions.

Along side these concepts, I wanted to reflect on what people around me have used in order to cope with the process of mourning, identifying the natural, immediate human reaction when dealing with loss, away from the critique and stigma built up through societal standard. In my experience, people crave comfort over all else when dealing with grief. The colours and silhouettes that build up this collection originate from the physicality of my observations and represent the more abstract concept associated with the process of decay, such as the contrast between descent into and ascent from the mourning process. By reclaiming heavy duvets, curtains and bed sheets, I was able to replicate and materialise this abstract concept into something tangible. The pieces in this collection allow the wearer to escape within themselves, be succumbed by the materials, comforted by their surroundings, allowing their personal space to be the catalyst for their recovery.