I Made This for You and Me,
Hadley Clark
September 5 – November 15th
Opening Reception: Thursday,September 12th, 5-7PM
Memory Circle Workshop: Saturday, October 12th, 12-3pm
Free Parking in the Cherry St. Garage, level 6
UMKC Gallery of Art is pleased to present, I Made This for You and Me an installation of sculptural garments from the studio of artist, educator and designer Hadley Clark. This exhibition captures the artist as she eschews garments’ utility on the body in favor of the personal and spiritual signifiers they carry on the wall. The exhibition is also reflective of the artist’s negotiation of her own place within the fashion industry; an industry for which she was educated, trained, pursued, and began to pull away from after years of struggle coupled with a broadening understanding of the industry’s socioeconomic and ecological impacts worldwide. I Made This for You and Me marks the first solo exhibition of Clark’s sculptural garments which include jackets trailing their own scrap, hand-me-down shorts as hung curtains, a set of coats pulling on either end of their shared yardage; each with colors and surfaces collaged and uneven, like a feeling as it passes.
The exhibition captures the artist as she ventures outward from the garment-forward practice she once pursued and draws on the activities of her home life that inspired this new body of work. Says Clark of her home-as-studio “it is an ever-expanding circuit, traveling from my sewing table to my home closet, from scraps to the backyard compost or maybe back to the studio, to garden beds and then to kitchen stovetop, from the changing of the seasons, and then back again, and maybe a little wider next time. “. Functionally, this cycle serves as a belief system underpinning her practice and results in work that is created slowly and humbly using plant-dyed, found, and donated textiles. Incorporating discarded cuts from the floor of Clark’s studio, the work leaves space for consideration of the emotional and psychological content embedded in the fabric we wear. This in turn memorializes the garments in the life of its wearer and illuminates the connections between materials and our personal experiences.
The artist will host a mending workshop at the gallery during the exhibition that will include technical hand sewing demonstrations as well as a space to intimately connect participants and their garments through the act of stitching. Memory Circle Workshop will take place on Saturday, October 12th, from 12-3pm.
Hadley Clark received her BFA from University of Kansas in 2001 as well as high-end fashion design and garment construction from the The New School | Parsons Paris in 2010. Clark maintains a fine art studio practice as well as an eponymous fashion label. In addition to her independent studio work, Clark leads regular community-based workshops relating to her own studio interests on subjects as varied as sewing basics, methods of mending, 3-Dimensional construction, and collaging with reused textiles. Clark is currently a resident at Studios Inc, in Kansas City.