Ciara Phillips
For the exhibition in Lichtenberg, Ciara Phillips has turned to the body and in particular to clothing as a site of social discourse and meaning. For Phillips, sewing has long been an artistic practice realised in parallel with her graphic print works.
Printed textiles are often part of her complex spatial installations. Phillips explores the myriad ways in which print intersects with our daily lives, whether through media, advertising, banknotes or clothing. Everywhere, print acts as an important validator and signifier. Phillips pays particular attention to how print products are used by women as a key to consciousness-raising. An exemplary moment for this was British fashion designer Katherine Hamnett’s meeting with then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984. Hamnett used this public moment to quickly present a political statement – “58% Don’t Want Pershing” – on her sweatshirt. Hamnett thus seized on the social movement against the planned stationing of new US nuclear Pershing missiles in the UK and gave it a large media audience in a subversive and unexpected way. Some of Phillips’ self-produced and printed T-shirts, such as “Immigrant with a vote” and “Taxpayer with no vote”, make visual reference to Hamnett’s sweatshirt, responding directly to the current discourse around issues of migration, social participation or who is or is not eligible to vote in UK elections. During preliminary research for the exhibition at after the butcher, Phillips came across a photograph of two (or four) women who became living and walking billboards for the Schöneberg variety theatre Scala in Berlin in the 1920s. Phillips worked for 4 weeks as part of a residency at Lichtenberg Studios, developing new work for this exhibition that draws on, among other things, the centuries-old history of textile and clothing manufacturing in Lichtenberg itself.
