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, Barbie Goes Shopping and Hey Superman were selected by curator Hannah Rose for Material Actions at the Mirror Gallery in Plymouth. The exhibition brought 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 Billboard Skirts a different resonance. I had made them 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 cultural atmosphere of the early 2000s: the convergence of celebrity, fashion and advertising with increasingly homogenised ideals of beauty and a culture in which consumption had become deeply entwined with identity.
She interested me precisely because she occupied several positions simultaneously. Barbie 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 greatly admired the sculptural skirt works of my colleague Alison Willoughby. Their physical presence—their weight, volume and extraordinary 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 onto which cultural expectations, commercial messages and fantasies of identity were projected.
Making with What We Throw Away
There was also a pragmatic material story behind the works.
Through my consultancy with Professor Rebecca Earley and Textiles Environment Design at the University of the Arts London, I was thinking constantly about how the useful lives of materials might be extended. I collected discarded 1980s wraparound denim skirts from Beyond Retro on Brick Lane—garments that fashion had already rendered obsolete—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.
Rather than disappearing into landfill, they acquired another life as art.
The resulting surfaces were deliberately rough and layered, resembling billboards repeatedly pasted over with new advertisements. Images and messages became partially obscured but never entirely disappeared. The materials retained evidence of their previous lives.
The Plastics 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. Susan Mossman of the Science Museum, who contributed to the publication, later became my PhD supervisor, while another contributor, Jeffrey Meikle of the University of Texas, became my PhD 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.
Looking Back from 2010
Writing about the work 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 Plastics Age.”
Reading those words now, I am interested in the historical moment they capture. The skirts 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.”
That 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.
The plastic was not simply the subject of the work. It became its substance: collage, colour, image and paint simultaneously.
Material Actions
Hannah Rose described the artists selected for Material Actions as representing diverse approaches to questioning how textiles could be used to affect and contribute to “ethical, social, cultural and environmental change.”
Kate Fletcher developed this thinking in her specially commissioned catalogue essay. She brought my work together with that of Sue Bradley and Alison Harper as examples of resourcefulness: artists reworking discarded resources while animating not only the waste materials themselves but also their “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 that becoming practically and productively involved with materials could reconnect us with our material world and, by extension, with environment, community and future.
She concluded by describing Material Actions as both an exhibition and a “manifesto for a resourceful, connected and active future.”
That idea of material agency resonated strongly 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 and paint.
From Sail to Archive
The presentation at Plymouth also changed the physical reading of the works.
When I first exhibited the Billboard Skirts at the Triangle Gallery in 2007, I suspended them from the mast of an improvised boat like sails and billboards. They were vertical, airborne and bodily—garments transformed into paintings occupying architectural space.
At the Mirror Gallery, Hannah Rose presented the skirts horizontally on specially made low plinths.
It was not how I would have chosen to display them, and it produced a very different interpretation of the work.
Removed from the body, billboard and sail, the horizontal skirt became almost archival: a material document preserving evidence of a particular moment in consumer culture. Looking at the installation photographs now, the low plinths remind me of archaeological display cases, with the works laid out for examination.
Neither Hannah nor I articulated that distinction at the time. It is something I recognise looking back.
My original installation emphasised movement, painting, advertising and spatial presence. Hannah’s presentation emphasised object, evidence, material history and archive.
The object itself had not changed.
Its meaning had shifted through display.
That experience now seems significant to me. Once an artwork leaves the studio, the artist is no longer the only person producing its meaning. Curators, architecture, neighbouring works and modes of display enter the conversation. Sometimes they reinforce the artist’s intention; sometimes they redirect it and reveal readings that the artist had not anticipated.
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), in which 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 somehow peripheral to serious 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.
An Encounter That Continued
My involvement with Material Actions extended beyond exhibiting the work. On 16 October 2010, I was invited to give a presentation as part of the accompanying seminar at Plymouth College of Art, alongside Lucy Brown, Jonnet Middleton and Charlotte Squire.
The seminar was subsequently voted the students’ best seminar day of that academic year, but its significance for me only became apparent much later.
Hannah remembered both the presentation and my work.
In 2015, five years after Material Actions, she contacted me to discuss returning to the gallery for another exhibition. Her initial idea was for a project involving artists associated with my Slow Textiles Group and Textiles Hub London, along the lines of The Geometrics, a group exhibition I had curated and which she admired.
I felt strongly that this time the exhibition needed to be a solo show.
That conversation eventually became Drapes.
Looking back, I can see a line running directly from Billboard Skirts and Material Actions to that later installation. The connection is not simply one of materials. In the original boat installation, I had already begun asking what happens when painting leaves the wall: when cloth becomes spatial, when an image becomes an object and when the support itself is allowed to carry meaning.
An encounter with a curator in 2010 remained dormant for five years and then generated another opportunity, another exhibition and another body of work.
Perhaps artworks do something similar.
They leave the studio, enter other people’s hands and other spaces, acquire interpretations we did not necessarily intend and continue accumulating histories.
The materials remain.
But their meanings keep moving.
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 a specially commissioned introductory essay by Dr Kate Fletcher.
Catalogue design: Fraser Muggeridge studio Fraser Muggeridge studio.
Barbie Goes Shopping, 2007
Recycled polythene on second-hand denim
110 × 70 cm