I embroidered ‘A Working Manifesto’ onto an apron. The apron is my symbol of human labour. It is worn over a business shirt and trousers, which also implies work. Grey is the predominate colour. I am wanting to reflect that humdrum-everyday-here we go again aspect that work can provoke…the 40 hour week and the joy of that imminent weekend! If there wasn’t the work, would there be the same joy for the weekend?

The apron is worn over the trousers, as a bit of a play with gender in the workforce. Mind you, an apron is as much a male work garment as a female one.

I like the yellow/white pin stripe in the shirt fabric, and this is where I have played with my ‘craft’, by way of an argyle pattern. I have taken knitted fabric scraps, such as rib and cotton knit, and presented them in an abstract form of an argyle pattern, thinking about a sweater vest being worn over the shirt.

Argyle pattern is derived from the Scottish tartan of the Clan Campbell of Argyll, Western Scotland. The 5^th Earl of Argyll supposedly supported Mary, Queen of Scots, and so argyle took on a hint of the rebellious/ the radical.(Just like RK/CdG, the rebel and the radical, check out my blog.) The argyle pattern was very prominent in the knitted pattern socks known as “tartan hose’ and the required knitting technique to produce it is called intarsia, which is sometimes known as picture knitting, and I bet it took a lot of satisfying work to create by hand!

Although argyle was made popular by the Duke of Windsor and his golf playing, I am definitely not working with it as a reflection of elite leisure. My ‘A Working Manifesto’ message is quite the opposite of what an elite leisure evokes! Some people see argyle as being very “preppy”, again, not what I am expressing.

This work is an example of clothes making being an expression of my activism. I am engaging in a process of being active, by way of manipulating fabric with all my resources, to make a statement I feel strongly about.