Barbie Goes Shopping: Material Actions and the Plastics Age
Barbie Goes Shopping is my favourite of the Billboard Skirts. Made in 2007 from discarded polythene and second-hand denim, it belongs to a series exploring consumer desire, identity and the increasingly complicated relationship between the materials we throw away and the images that persuade us to acquire more.
In 2010, two of the Billboard Skirts were selected by curator Hannah Rose for Material Actions, an exhibition at the Mirror Gallery in Plymouth bringing together thirteen artists and makers whose work explored the capacity of materials and making to contribute to ethical, social, cultural and environmental change.
The timing gave the work a different resonance. I had made the skirts in autumn 2007, at the height of the consumer boom and a year before the financial collapse of 2008. By the time they reappeared in Material Actions, the culture of apparently limitless consumption against which they had been made looked rather different.
Barbie and Consumer Desire
Of the series, Barbie Goes Shopping remains the work I return to most often. Barbie seemed to encapsulate something I felt very strongly about the early 2000s: the convergence of celebrity, fashion, advertising and increasingly homogenised ideals of beauty with a culture in which consumption had become deeply entwined with identity.
Barbie interested me precisely because she occupied several positions simultaneously. She was a toy, an international commercial product, an image of femininity and a cultural myth. She could represent aspiration and possibility while also embodying highly manufactured ideas about appearance, lifestyle and desire.
The skirt seemed the perfect support for exploring these contradictions.
During my time in Constructed Textiles at the Royal College of Art, I had greatly admired the sculptural skirt works of my colleague Alison Willoughby. Their physical presence—their weight, volume and storytelling potential—made me think differently about the cultural history carried by a garment.
A skirt is never simply a piece of cloth. It can communicate gender, status, fashion, sexuality, vulnerability, conformity, rebellion and belonging. Its changing lengths, proportions and silhouettes reveal changing attitudes towards women’s bodies and behaviour.
In Billboard Skirts, I turned that garment into another familiar surface: the advertising billboard. The female body and the billboard could both become places upon which cultural expectations, commercial messages and fantasies of identity were projected.
The Plastic Age
My fascination with plastic had begun much earlier. When I was twenty, I saw The Plastics Age: From Modernity to Post-Modernity at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1990. The exhibition made a lasting impression on me and was accompanied by a book edited by design historian Penny Sparke, who would later teach me at the Royal College of Art.
There were other connections I could not have anticipated at twenty. Contributors to the intellectual history surrounding plastics would later intersect with my own doctoral research: Susan Mossman of the Science Museum became my PhD supervisor, while Jeffrey Meikle of the University of Texas became my external examiner.
Plastic, for me, therefore never represented simply a troublesome modern material. It carried a much larger cultural history: modernity, technological optimism, mass production, Pop, disposability, consumer desire and, increasingly, environmental consequence.
By 2007 those contradictions had become impossible for me to ignore.
I collected discarded 1980s wraparound denim skirts from Beyond Retro on Brick Lane and combined them with used plastic carrier bags. The bags were cut, montaged and heat-pressed onto the denim, leaving fragments of their ageing advertising messages visible.
One obsolete material encountered another.
The resulting surfaces were deliberately rough and layered, resembling billboards repeatedly pasted over with new advertisements. Images and messages were partially obscured but never entirely disappeared. The materials retained evidence of their previous lives.
Reading My 2010 Statement Again
For the Material Actions catalogue I described the Billboard Skirts as telling:
“a story of identity, gender, consumerism, and their interdependence during the crash and burn years of the 20th century Plastic Age.”
Reading those words now, I am interested by the historical moment they capture. The works had been created during the final exuberant phase of the pre-crash consumer economy, but I was writing about them three years later from the other side of the financial crisis.
I also described the discarded carrier bags as retaining their “ageing advertisers’ messages,” deliberately allowing fragments of their former commercial language to resonate through the new images.
This remains important to me. I wasn’t trying to disguise waste by making it look like something else. I wanted its previous identity to remain visible.
In that sense, the plastic operates simultaneously as material, image, collage and paint.
Material Actions
Hannah Rose placed the works within a wider argument about the capacity of material practice to participate in change. In the catalogue, she described the selected artists as representing diverse approaches to questioning how textiles might contribute to “ethical, social, cultural and environmental change.”
Kate Fletcher developed this further in her catalogue essay. She brought my work together with that of Sue Bradley and Alison Harper as examples of resourcefulness: artists reworking discarded resources while revealing not only the materials themselves but their latent “potential and value.”
Her larger proposition was that making could move us from passive consumption towards active participation. Drawing upon the thinking of industrial ecologist John Ehrenfeld, Fletcher argued for practical involvement with the material world as a means of reconnecting with environment, community and future.
She concluded by describing Material Actions as both exhibition and “manifesto for a resourceful, connected and active future.”
That idea of material agency resonates with me, although my own concern in Billboard Skirts was also specifically painterly. Rather than representing consumer culture using conventional artists’ materials, I wanted the physical debris of that culture to become the material from which the image was made.
Polythene became collage, colour, image and paint.
From Sail to Archive
There was another transformation in Plymouth that I understand more clearly in retrospect.
When I first exhibited Billboard Skirts at the Triangle Gallery in 2007, I suspended them from a mast like sails above an improvised boat filled with discarded polythene. They were vertical, airborne and bodily. They were paintings, garments, billboards and sails occupying architectural space.
For Material Actions, the skirts were laid flat.
It was not how I would have chosen to display them, and it produced a very different reading of the work. Removed from the body, the billboard and the sail, the horizontal skirt became almost archival: a material document preserving evidence of a particular moment in consumer culture.
Seen flat, it could resemble an artefact in a museum vitrine—something to be examined, classified and interpreted.
I now find that distinction fascinating. The curator’s presentation produced an academic and archaeological reading of the work that differed from my intention as the artist. My installation emphasised movement, painting, advertising and spatial presence; the horizontal presentation emphasised evidence, material history and archive.
Neither encounter left the work unchanged.
Perhaps this is one of the things I have come to understand through exhibiting: once an artwork leaves the studio, its meaning is no longer produced by the artist alone. Curators, architecture, neighbouring works and modes of display can reveal readings that may coincide with—or depart considerably from—the artist’s original intention.
Femmage and Painting
Looking back, I can also place Barbie Goes Shopping within a longer history of feminist approaches to collage and material. I recognise affinities with Miriam Schapiro’s idea of femmage and works such as Mechano/Flower Fan (1979), where fabric, pattern, geometry and collage enter unapologetically into the language of painting.
What interests me in that lineage is the refusal to regard materials associated with clothing, decoration and domestic making as peripheral to painting.
My materials came directly from contemporary consumer life. The denim had been worn and discarded; the plastic had carried somebody else’s purchases and advertisements. Neither was neutral. Both arrived already carrying histories of use, fashion, desire and obsolescence.
In Barbie Goes Shopping, those histories became part of the painting.
Looking back from today, this may be what connects the work most strongly to my later practice. Materials are never merely supports for images. They arrive carrying histories of their own, and each subsequent encounter—with an artist, a curator, an architecture or an audience—adds another layer.
Exhibition
Material Actions Mirror Gallery, Plymouth College of Art 2010
Curated by Hannah Rose.
Developed in partnership with Plymouth College of Art and Textile Forum South West.
Catalogue published by Plymouth College of Art Press, with an introductory essay by Kate Fletcher. Designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio.
