En dimanchée / Sunday Best 2005
In this work, I fashioned garments from newsprint appropriating this material to create public expressions of personal identity. Current affairs, editorials, sports, financial reports, art reviews, entertainment events, obituaries, car ads, classified ads, comics, all seep into our subconscious to varying degrees. Sunday Best is fashioned from the daily newspaper, but represents a woman’s “Sunday best” outfit. When I was a young girl, my mother would have us all wear our best clothes on the Sunday mornings for the church service. This was followed by a special lunch with invited guests. It was a day of “bests” – best clothes, best dishes, best cooking, best behavior. There was something stiff and fragile about this whole experience that has embedded itself in my memory. And something incongruous about the pristine manifestations of “Sunday best” that seemed so at odds with the calamities of the week. I fashioned this garment out of the daily newspaper. Paper holds a crisp fold, but tears easily. As the bearer of world events, good and bad, but mostly bad, newsprint capture the dichotomy between perception and reality.