The corpse of the fashion industry is on display at Camden Art Centre. Its bloated and vile and pungent, left here to rot, part-embalmed, by Tenant of Culture (Hendrickje Schimmel to her mum and dad).
ToC’s work involves collecting discarded old clothes and repurposing them into new sculptures. The room here is filled with synthetic waterproof polymers and chemically produced plastics that were once twisted into shoes and jackets and then chucked away by careless consumers like me and you. Tenant of Culture has collected those fabrics, washed them, dyed them, bleached them and reshaped them. Dozens of transparent plastic handbags have been turned into coats, denim has been dyed acid yellow and transformed into a long, hanging tapestry, hiking shoes have been sewn together into a bizarre, enormous boot.
In all this dyeing and reshaping and recycling, Tenant of Culture is loudly condemning not just fast fashion, but the more general scourge of waste in society, and the greed that elicits it. You feel icky walking around the space, knowing you’re complicit in the damage on display.
But the works here aren’t quite divorced enough from the fashions that inspired them; they look too much like something you might actually see on a runway to really get their ideas across. You end up wishing the work had been taken further, made more grotesque, more alien. As it is, you get the point, but you also sort of wonder if you could pull off that see-through jacket.
