Billboard Skirts was the first body of work in which I consciously began to think beyond the picture plane. Developed from my PhD research in Constructed Textiles at the Royal College of Art, the series explored how discarded materials could become the substance of painting itself.
The series comprised six works: Barbie Goes Shopping, Hey Superman, Swiss Land, I Thought It Would Come True, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Appealing? and War Games. Each was constructed from recycled plastic bags and second-hand denim, using a printing process that grew directly from my doctoral research into extending the life of waste plastics through design.
The works were first exhibited in Ever & Again: Experimental Recycled Textiles curated by Professor Rebecca Earley at the Triangle Gallery, Chelsea College of Art, London, from 19–25 October 2007. At the time, I was also working with Textiles Environment Design at the University of the Arts London as a consultant exploring polymer textiles and sustainable material innovation.
Rather than displaying the skirts individually, I constructed an installation in which they were suspended like sails from the mast of an old cupboard turned on its side to form a boat. The cupboard itself was visibly filled with discarded polythene—the source material from which the works had been made. The installation responded to the growing awareness of plastic gyres accumulating in the Pacific Ocean, proposing that waste might be understood not simply as pollution but as a material resource with the potential for transformation.
Looking back, I realise that this installation anticipated many of the questions that continue to shape my practice. Rather than treating painting as an image on a wall, I was already interested in how painting might occupy space, how materials carry histories and how discarded objects can acquire new lives through art.
Each skirt functioned simultaneously as garment, painting and billboard. Layers of printed plastic retained fragments of their original commercial messages while accumulating new ones, exposing the endless circulation of desire through consumer culture. Rather than celebrating consumption, the works asked how advertising, fashion and branding shape our understanding of identity, aspiration and self-worth.
Reading my contribution to the exhibition catalogue today, I am struck by how many of the questions that continue to occupy my practice were already present. In 2007 I wrote:
“Billboard Skirts is a series of skirts made of plastic bags and second-hand denim. Each skirt is worked in a rough, layered fashion to resemble billboards plastered with images. These are not practical reinventions per se, but comments on consumerism.
For this project I read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Rather than starting from a material perspective as I had in the past, I used the Ever & Again project to consider a conceptual approach. Comparing George Orwell’s and Aldous Huxley’s visions, Postman writes: ‘No Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As Huxley saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.’
Our technological media bombard us with images online, on television and in the street. Caught unchecked, these images grip us in semi-conscious cycles of desire and longing.
By cutting and layering plastic bags with remnants of their original messages still visible, I have tried to illuminate the advertiser’s empty promises while adding my own interventions as food for thought. The aesthetic appeal of plastic rubbish becomes undeniable, yet it is also a material that can remain in existence for over two hundred years.”
The exhibition was accompanied by an outstanding catalogue featuring a foreword by environmental journalist and The One Show BBC presenter Lucy Siegle and an essay by Sarah Scaturro, Chief Conservator at the Cleveland Museum of Art and, previously, the head of the conservation laboratory in the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Writing about the exhibition, Siegle observed that while many artists addressed textile waste through repair and reuse, my work proposed another possibility: to see discarded plastic not simply as rubbish but as a resource whose extraordinary longevity demanded new ways of thinking. That recognition was particularly meaningful as it echoed the central concerns of my doctoral research.
Looking back today, I see Billboard Skirts as the beginning of a continuing investigation into painting, material and memory. Long before Drapes, the installation asked how contemporary materials might extend the language of painting and how artworks could transform the discarded remains of everyday life into new cultural narratives. The series marked the beginning of a practice that continues to explore how materials accumulate histories, how encounters reshape meaning and how painting can expand beyond the conventions of the canvas.
Exhibition
Ever & Again: Experimental Recycled Textiles
Triangle Gallery, Chelsea College of Art, London
19–25 October 2007
Curated by Professor Rebecca Earley.
Catalogue with a foreword by Lucy Siegle and an essay by Sarah Scaturro (Smithsonian Institution, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum).