yun ki
something soft
is
on the floor
I emptied my wardrobe onto 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 of accumulation.
I sat with the discomfort of it.
Getting rid of everything would have been efficient. There is a feeling of virtue in clearing space, as if the problem dissolves when the object leaves the room.
Even donated textiles remain materially persistent, passing through systems rather than simply disappearing. Keeping everything unchanged felt equally difficult to justify. Neither option felt particularly clean.
So I chose one piece and cut into it.
The hesitation is physical. The garment is still intact at that moment. I turned a long-sleeve T-shirt inside out and traced the seams with my fingers. The fabric had thinned at the elbows. It had already adapted once to my body.
What else can you hold?
What the hand finds in a worn garment is more than material. The pattern is already there, along with the decisions that shaped it. A garment has been cut around a body, given proportions, allowances, seams and somewhere to stretch. Someone has already worked out how it occupies space and to dismantle it into flat fabric and start again from an external pattern would mean undoing all of that before I had even begun.
I wasn't particularly interested in doing that.
I wanted to see what I could make while leaving those decisions in place. A sleeve already has a way of hanging. A pair of jeans has been shaped around the body and its movement. These conditions are not problems to solve but the starting point. I work with the pattern that is there, even when it leads somewhere unexpected.
Sometimes a sweater becomes a bag, other times it becomes something in between. I try not to correct the garment too much, or make it conform to an idea of what the finished object should look like. This can produce some awkward forms. I'm still figuring out how much awkwardness I can live with.
Sometimes I catch myself wanting things to look more resolved, more finished. It would be easier to make something that looks entirely new, something that doesn't reveal the decisions that came before it. But then I would lose the very thing that interested me in the first place.
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. It has stayed with me because it describes something I had been circling without quite knowing how to put it. I live inside the same system of overproduction as everyone else. The wardrobe on the floor was evidence of that. I bought these clothes, wore them, kept them, and eventually forgot about some of them. I am part of the accumulation too.
I'm not sure making bags from old clothes changes much on its own. It doesn't undo what has already been produced, and I don't want to pretend it does. But it gives me another way to deal with what I already have, rather than immediately looking for something else.
Making from what is here is slower. The sewing machine sits on the same table where I eat, draw and mix. The thread is usually whatever is left on the spool, though sometimes I choose something different to complement the fabric. Denim resists and holds its shape; jersey stretches and yields. I cannot force one to behave like the other. I have to adjust, sometimes more than I would like.
Construction after surplus is quieter than construction before it. It doesn't begin from a tabula rasa, but with a garment that has already been made, worn and put aside. There is no clean beginning, only the question of what can happen next without undoing everything that came before.
The pieces I make are not always refined. They hold what they need to hold, and they still resemble what they were. I like that, though I haven't quite worked out how much of the original needs to remain.
There are still clothes waiting, I haven't decided what to do with all of them yet.
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 of accumulation.
I sat with the discomfort of it.
Getting rid of everything would have been efficient. There is a feeling of virtue in clearing space, as if the problem dissolves when the object leaves the room.
Even donated textiles remain materially persistent, passing through systems rather than simply disappearing. Keeping everything unchanged felt equally difficult to justify. Neither option felt particularly clean.
So I chose one piece and cut into it.
The hesitation is physical. The garment is still intact at that moment. I turned a long-sleeve T-shirt inside out and traced the seams with my fingers. The fabric had thinned at the elbows. It had already adapted once to my body.
What else can you hold?
What the hand finds in a worn garment is more than material. The pattern is already there, along with the decisions that shaped it. A garment has been cut around a body, given proportions, allowances, seams and somewhere to stretch. Someone has already worked out how it occupies space and to dismantle it into flat fabric and start again from an external pattern would mean undoing all of that before I had even begun.
I wasn't particularly interested in doing that.
I wanted to see what I could make while leaving those decisions in place. A sleeve already has a way of hanging. A pair of jeans has been shaped around the body and its movement. These conditions are not problems to solve but the starting point. I work with the pattern that is there, even when it leads somewhere unexpected.
Sometimes a sweater becomes a bag, other times it becomes something in between. I try not to correct the garment too much, or make it conform to an idea of what the finished object should look like. This can produce some awkward forms. I'm still figuring out how much awkwardness I can live with.
Sometimes I catch myself wanting things to look more resolved, more finished. It would be easier to make something that looks entirely new, something that doesn't reveal the decisions that came before it. But then I would lose the very thing that interested me in the first place.
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. It has stayed with me because it describes something I had been circling without quite knowing how to put it. I live inside the same system of overproduction as everyone else. The wardrobe on the floor was evidence of that. I bought these clothes, wore them, kept them, and eventually forgot about some of them. I am part of the accumulation too.
I'm not sure making bags from old clothes changes much on its own. It doesn't undo what has already been produced, and I don't want to pretend it does. But it gives me another way to deal with what I already have, rather than immediately looking for something else.
Making from what is here is slower. The sewing machine sits on the same table where I eat, draw and mix. The thread is usually whatever is left on the spool, though sometimes I choose something different to complement the fabric. Denim resists and holds its shape; jersey stretches and yields. I cannot force one to behave like the other. I have to adjust, sometimes more than I would like.
Construction after surplus is quieter than construction before it. It doesn't begin from a tabula rasa, but with a garment that has already been made, worn and put aside. There is no clean beginning, only the question of what can happen next without undoing everything that came before.
The pieces I make are not always refined. They hold what they need to hold, and they still resemble what they were. I like that, though I haven't quite worked out how much of the original needs to remain.
There are still clothes waiting, I haven't decided what to do with all of them yet.
