yun ki
something soft
is
on the floor
I emptied my wardrobe on the floor and didn’t touch it for a while.
Clothes look different when they are horizontal, they lose proportion and intention. What felt like separate decisions, a sweater bought one winter, jeans from another year, something kept just because it was expensive, became a single mass. Not abundance, not exactly excess just accumulation...
I sat with the discomfort of it.
Getting rid of everything would have been efficient. I mean, there is a feeling of virtue in clearing space, as if the problem dissolves when the object leaves the place. But I know that removal is rarely disappearance, things move elsewhere and they continue. Even donated textile remains materially persistent, cycling through systems rather than leaving them. Keeping everything unchanged felt equally dishonest, as if ownership alone were enough justification. Neither resolution was clean.
So I chose one piece and cut into it. (Yunki 1.0, 2024)
The hesitation is always physical. The garment still holds together at that moment, it still knows what it is. I turned a long-sleeve T-shirt inside out and traced the seams with my fingers. The fabric had thinned at the elbows. The collar had stretched. It had already adapted once to my body.
Clothes look different when they are horizontal, they lose proportion and intention. What felt like separate decisions, a sweater bought one winter, jeans from another year, something kept just because it was expensive, became a single mass. Not abundance, not exactly excess just accumulation...
I sat with the discomfort of it.
Getting rid of everything would have been efficient. I mean, there is a feeling of virtue in clearing space, as if the problem dissolves when the object leaves the place. But I know that removal is rarely disappearance, things move elsewhere and they continue. Even donated textile remains materially persistent, cycling through systems rather than leaving them. Keeping everything unchanged felt equally dishonest, as if ownership alone were enough justification. Neither resolution was clean.
So I chose one piece and cut into it. (Yunki 1.0, 2024)
The hesitation is always physical. The garment still holds together at that moment, it still knows what it is. I turned a long-sleeve T-shirt inside out and traced the seams with my fingers. The fabric had thinned at the elbows. The collar had stretched. It had already adapted once to my body.
What else can you hold?
What the hand finds in a worn garment is not just material but encoded history: the stress in the seams, tension in the weave, time written into the cloth for the hand to receive.
What interests me is that the pattern is already there.
A garment has already been cut around a body. Decisions have already been made. Proportions, tensions, allowances, adjustments. Somebody has already worked out how this object occupies space. To dismantle such an object into neutral fabric and begin again from an external pattern would repeat the abstraction that commodity culture already performed on it when it first appeared on a shelf, sealed and complete. The wardrobe accumulates this detachment and I’m not particularly interested in that repetition.
What kept my attention was the possibility of working with those decisions rather than undoing them. A sleeve already contains an idea of how it wants to hang. A pair of jeans has already been shaped around movement. Those conditions are not obstacles to work around, they are the reason I begin.
The challenge is less about making something new than seeing how far an existing construction can be extended without losing itself entirely. Sometimes a sweater becomes a bag. Sometimes it becomes something in between. The original garment continues to exert a certain influence over the outcome, and I have learnt to follow that rather than correct it.
Sometimes that produces awkward things.
The object refuses to feel entirely new, it carries evidence and resists smoothness. Though sometimes I catch myself wanting that smoothness.
“Constraint is not solely scarcity but ethical hesitation in the face of abundance.” I wrote that down somewhere and cannot remember where it came from, but it has stayed with me because it names something I had been circling without being able to say directly. I live inside the same system of overproduction as everyone else and the wardrobe on the floor was evidence of that participation. What I am trying to do is not escape that condition but operate inside it differently, extending rather than replacing.
Making from what is here is slower, the sewing machine sits on the same table where I eat, draw and mix. The thread is whatever is left on the spool though sometime not really, I try to compliment the fabric that I am working on. Denim resists and holds its shape; jersey stretches and surrenders. I cannot force one to behave like the other. I have to adjust.
Construction after surplus is quieter than construction before it. It does not begin from a tabula rasa but from what is already present: compromise, negotiation, wear, memory, and the recognition that what exists may already be enough.
The pieces I make are not refined, they are adequate and they hold what they need to hold. They still resemble what they were. I like that they don’t fully escape themselves.
There are still clothes waiting, for now, I am trying to stay with them;)
What the hand finds in a worn garment is not just material but encoded history: the stress in the seams, tension in the weave, time written into the cloth for the hand to receive.
What interests me is that the pattern is already there.
A garment has already been cut around a body. Decisions have already been made. Proportions, tensions, allowances, adjustments. Somebody has already worked out how this object occupies space. To dismantle such an object into neutral fabric and begin again from an external pattern would repeat the abstraction that commodity culture already performed on it when it first appeared on a shelf, sealed and complete. The wardrobe accumulates this detachment and I’m not particularly interested in that repetition.
What kept my attention was the possibility of working with those decisions rather than undoing them. A sleeve already contains an idea of how it wants to hang. A pair of jeans has already been shaped around movement. Those conditions are not obstacles to work around, they are the reason I begin.
The challenge is less about making something new than seeing how far an existing construction can be extended without losing itself entirely. Sometimes a sweater becomes a bag. Sometimes it becomes something in between. The original garment continues to exert a certain influence over the outcome, and I have learnt to follow that rather than correct it.
Sometimes that produces awkward things.
The object refuses to feel entirely new, it carries evidence and resists smoothness. Though sometimes I catch myself wanting that smoothness.
“Constraint is not solely scarcity but ethical hesitation in the face of abundance.” I wrote that down somewhere and cannot remember where it came from, but it has stayed with me because it names something I had been circling without being able to say directly. I live inside the same system of overproduction as everyone else and the wardrobe on the floor was evidence of that participation. What I am trying to do is not escape that condition but operate inside it differently, extending rather than replacing.
Making from what is here is slower, the sewing machine sits on the same table where I eat, draw and mix. The thread is whatever is left on the spool though sometime not really, I try to compliment the fabric that I am working on. Denim resists and holds its shape; jersey stretches and surrenders. I cannot force one to behave like the other. I have to adjust.
Construction after surplus is quieter than construction before it. It does not begin from a tabula rasa but from what is already present: compromise, negotiation, wear, memory, and the recognition that what exists may already be enough.
The pieces I make are not refined, they are adequate and they hold what they need to hold. They still resemble what they were. I like that they don’t fully escape themselves.
There are still clothes waiting, for now, I am trying to stay with them;)
