Cutting patterns are mesmerising objects: once you transfer the paper patterns onto fabric, cut and stitch the various pieces together, you create indeed a wearable three-dimensional piece. It must have been this key passage from a flat dimension to a completely new life that first prompted London-based Hormazd Narielwalla to start using discarded tailoring and sewing patterns to create his collages.
At times in Narielwalla's works paper figures like his "Pretty Boys", dandies from East London, emerge out of colourful cocooning garments that, close up, reveal to be sections of patterns for a random shoulder or a sleeve, paper bits and pieces that throughout the years Narielwalla has also employed to recreate ironic dolls of iconic figures such as Frida Kahlo, Klaus Nomi and Anna Piaggi.
At others the artist folds the patterns to create paper sculptures like his work "Memento Mori", a skull that doubles up as a sort of paper urn for a tailor's dead customer. Tailoring shops such as the ones in Savile Row destroy indeed the tailoring patterns of a customer when the latter dies.
By rescuing these paper pieces and transforming them into something else (the first patterns he rescued from Savile Row tailoring firm Dege & Skinner were turned into a book, Dead Man's Patterns), the Narielwalla gives them a new life and the possibility of becoming contemporary artworks.
Fans of his works can now admire his series of 12 new commissioned pieces at the Southbank Centre, London (until 21 October). Narielwalla's "Lost Gardens" is on display on the upper level, overlooking the riverfront.
The works this time move from 1950s patterns: these pieces are quite peculiar since, to avoid wasting money the patterns for a garment were printed on one single sheet. Narielwalla filled up with colours the pattern sections or the spaces in between them.
The palette he chose – a mix of vivid red, electric blue, bright pink and sunny yellow – and the geometrical shapes he has coloured in contribute to turn the patterns from functional documents into visually catching labyrinthine abstract works.
One of the main inspirations behind these new works was the community garden in Pune, India, with its rose beds. This place of peace, solace and quiet that the artist visited as a child was sold and destroyed to make room for a building.
Narielwalla recreates the garden on paper, almost to preserve in his memory what couldn't be saved in real life: the patterns turn indeed into a sort of hedge maze maybe made of colourful rose bushes and the visitors are invited to consider the patterns not for what they are, but as fantastic recreations of little botanical heavens admired from a bird's-eye view.
Reusing the patterns is a highly symbolic gesture: it hints at identity transforming and at the possibility of a dead person coming back to life through art. Rich sources of shapes, the patterns are also a way to explore the relationship between the pattern cutter, the tailor and the client.
That said, the geometrical patterns in this new body of work are reminiscent not just of Cubism, but of works by the Italian futurists: stare at a piece from a distance and you may be wondering if you're looking at a modern interpretation of a painting by Giacomo Balla for a hipsterish new audience with one main difference, Balla used canvases, here the pattern is the canvas and its spaces and shapes provide Narielwalla with the abstract silhouettes of colours he creates.
Surprisingly, the artist hasn't yet explored his work from an architectural and commercial fashion perspective: while looking at his three-dimensional pieces it is indeed easy to wonder if Narielwalla will one day move onto creating collages or sculptures of buildings. For what regards the commercial aspect, some of these pieces may easily be turned into prints for scarves, giving maybe patterns a new wearable life.
We'll see if Narielwalla decides to stick to fashion subjects or maybe move onto other themes and inspirations in future. For the time being it is good to know that cutting, sewing and embroidery patterns are still capable of telling their infinite stories through different mediums.
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