Outsourcing

   

Continuing my journey of material explorations, this series of Collagraph prints examines the clothing industries practise of outsourcing garment manufacturing, to poorer countries. They consider the disposable nature of fashion, first world consumption and obsession, and question the price paid by poorer countries, where factory fires and collapses have killed hundreds of workers.

In ‘Outsourcing’, I have deconstructed leather clothing and printed the individual pieces of these garments. Luxurious yet still serviceable, they were made by people who could never afford to replace clothes at the alarming rate the western fashion industry dictates. As fashion’s slaves we shop for stimulation, satisfaction, even obsession, while at home our cupboards burst with previous ‘investments’, now almost worthless due to this artificial construct.

These works carry the imprints of skin (animal and human), of the work of those that handled and stitched, wore and fondled it, and of lives lost. The printing process is unusually laborious, larger ‘blocks’ can take an entire day to ink by hand, and print. As usual, my projects reflect underlying personal conflict, in this case a desire for beautiful things with the growing knowledge of the real cost; weighing up the economic necessity for the work the industry provides against the human toll it takes.

 

I have developed a process, based on Collagraph printing. However these works sit outside the traditional idea of prints as being an edition of near identical images, from a single matrix. Printmaking has historically defined rules for the numbering of editions but in this context, the terminology of textiles seems to offer an appropriate methodology. In clothing manufacture, the collection of pattern pieces that make a garment are called blocks, and once finalised, can then be varied many times. Similarly, in these prints the ‘blocks’ can be infinitely re-arranged, reversed, and printed in various layers and colours… no two are the same.

 

 The title for the series is Outsourcing. The edition is numbered in the usual way, with the addition of EV (edition variable), to show that within the edition the prints are variable in colour. Breaking with convention, this is followed by B. I (II, III…and so on), meaning that the edition is from a ‘block’ with the same layout. Every new configuration or reversal of the pieces, is numbered as a consecutive ‘block’. The result is a number of small, variable editions. For example,

1/8  EV  B.I          ‘Outsourcing’       Rosemary Mortimer

 The initial prints are labelled as artists proofs. For example,

A/P  B.II              ‘Outsourcing’       Rosemary Mortimer

These small prints are the first in a series of explorations contributing to the development of new, more complex works. Currently I am working on larger prints, that respond to the April 2013 collapse of the eight storey Rana Plaza factory, in Savar near Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing 1129 workers.