Historical information

Hannah Gartside works across sculpture, installation and video. Her artworks transform found fabrics and clothing to articulate experiences and sensations of longing, tenderness, care and desire.

The artist writes:

“Waiting is a large-scale, found textile assemblage. This artwork continues my use of found, second-hand women’s clothing and accessories to tell transformation stories. Twenty-seven sleeves have been carefully unpicked from variously patterned black, silver and grey sequinned party dresses and blouses, and applied onto a silvery sequinned base fabric arc (the arc was once the skirt component of a party dress). These are celebratory fabrics worn for special events. I have stitched circles of firm millinery wire into the hem at the wrist of each sleeve, and added soft shoulder pads at the head to suggest an invisible arm in each sleeve.

Viewed through my metamorphosis short story ‘Frances, the moth’ (which describes a lonely woman who transforms into a moth after cutting herself out a cape using a pair of magical scissors), the sleeves in Waiting refer loosely in shape and form to a group of moth or butterfly cocoons suspended in time. They hang winking and sparkling, waiting patiently for change.”