tender cloths  2019

muslin, botanical materials

variable

 

When I first began my artist residency at Tender Funerals in 2017, I was surprised to find out that flowers used in funeral arrangements, particularly the large wreaths that sit atop the coffin are often discarded. I was struck by the expense and waste, knowing that families choose specific flowers for the deceased person, their favourite colour or bloom. I had experimented with some natural dyeing so decided to invite some of Tender’s families to participate in my project.

Over a period of eighteen months, I was given flowers and in turn, I dyed lengths of white muslin with the most colourful of them. I chose to work with muslin as it is traditionally used to make soft wraps and swaddling for newborn babies. So, to frame a life, at the beginning, as at the end. The cloths were collected and kept for exhibition at the culmination of a Create NSW Arts and Project Grant in 2019.

And as it happened, the one became two became three, or more. A field, a city, a gathering, a family of sorts, strange and beautiful relations. Veils, screens, skirts and aprons, collar bones, hips, a breeze. It can never be known until that moment. It reminds me to keep making in the not knowing.

The exhibition at Project Contemporary Artspace in Wollongong saw the cloths in relation to each other and to an audience. Each one was embroidered with tiny initials of the deceased. I knew them intimately. Several families came to see the work and I could direct them to their cloth.

I continue to make tender cloths. They are used in Tender’s mortuary rituals. You see, sometimes people come to with very little, no family or sometimes in difficult circumstances. I began this project with the intention of creating artworks, and then realised the cloths had a different determination, they began to fulfil their own tender purpose.

The ‘tender cloth’s project was initially funded by Culturebank Wollongong.

 

photos: Nina Kourea