During my PhD in Constructed Textiles at the Royal College of Art, I began experimenting with recycled plastics as a printing medium. What started as a technical investigation gradually became a way of thinking about painting, consumer culture and the material afterlife of everyday objects.
Billboard Skirts emerged from that research. The series explores the ways in which advertising, fashion and consumer culture shape expectations of women. While opportunities for meaningful work, creative agency and professional recognition have often been unevenly distributed, consumer culture has consistently offered an alternative promise: that identity can be constructed through endless acquisition.
Rather than treating clothing as fashion, I used the skirt as a symbolic form—a surface onto which images, desires and commercial messages are projected, in montage form. Printed with discarded polythene on to cotton, these works transform waste into image while questioning the cycles of consumption that produced it.
The work shown here, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (polythene on cotton, 110 × 70 cm, 2007), takes its title from Richard Hamilton’s celebrated 1956 collage. Hamilton’s work examined the rise of post-war consumer culture; mine revisits those questions half a century later through the lens of sustainability, fashion and gender.
The first presentation of Billboard Skirts took place in 2007 at The Triangle Gallery, Chelsea College of Art, London. The series was commissioned by Textiles Environment Design at the University of the Arts London and curated by Rebecca Earley for Ever & Again: Experimental Recycled Textiles, a touring exhibition that travelled throughout the UK between 2007 and 2008 in various iterations.
Looking back, Billboard Skirts marked an important turning point in my practice. It was one of the first bodies of work in which painting, printmaking, textiles and environmental concerns came together—questions that continue to inform my work today.
View of Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? at The Triangle Gallery, Chelsea College of Art, London, 2007. This exhibition marked the first public presentation of a body of work developed during my PhD at the Royal College of Art, in which recycled plastics became both a printing medium and a critical material.