With 20 years' nursing experience, Julie Cook's second career explores narratives of trauma and care, as she crafts textiles associated with comfort into wearable therapy. Asentamiento Dress is at first unsettling - somewhat evoking a padded cell - but is the wearable comfort blanket of dreams.
Starting life as a simple white cotton duvet with duck down feathers as filling, Julie has turned an everyday, even mundane household object into a hymn to pain and comfort. Marks on the duvet are intentional and integral, bringing those themes out through the evidence of lived experience in all its muckiness. The neck rim is yellowed, with stains and scratches to be found across the garment. A silk poultice is fixed to the inside to soothe the wearer’s heart; there are internally stitched bits to hold your arms in place within its warmth. It’s weathered, like we are, from being alive – but still here, as we are too. The dress wraps the wearer up in safety. Imagine the smell of your loved one or your home on the fabric as you cocoon into it, far from the world, the weights inside the hem acting as proxy hug-givers.
Crafts Council exhibited the dress as part of a 2008 touring exhibition, with Julie’s instructions for putting it on:
1) lift over the head and secure the neck with the knotted string
2) take up the secret arm position
3) to reset the body apply the internal silk poultice to your solar plexus
4) allow catharsis to take place and lift the skirt when you want to dance
Julie recited in a beautiful voice recording to accompany her maker’s statement for this piece, acquired in 2006, which you can hear at Collections Online:
“‘Take up your bed and walk’, said God - he still existed. I took him at his word and stitched a feather for my own back. A feather-fold of comfort smells and body heat. It suited me.”
Dafydd: “This is an enchanting object, so brilliantly re-imagined from its original use. The duvet contains marks and tears. By wearing those marks, rips, and discolouration, it allows for new interpretations.”
View on Collections Online