Based on the process of quilting, Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way (formed by Sheelagh Boyce & Annabelle Harty) articulate a visual dialogue in the works on display. A language emerges from the internal architecture of the selected garments and takes shape visually in the soft compositions of the quilts. Created through re-used garments, that are subjected to the process of de- and re-construction, the presented worksecho the history of abstract painting and modernist art, while intertwining their status as image and object.

In this context, the 8 new works on display do not merely emphasise the discovery of a form but rather focus on the elements of the clothing patterns themselves that become visual during the deconstructive process of their creation. A structure that appears to have grown from within, revealing its tactile relationships only at the moment of its disassembly while overturning the compositional logic of its own construction – much like the hidden laws of a world that, like Quilt 56 based on Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, seems to lie beyond its original spatial function. A world in which the parts and surfaces of garments almost take on a life of their own, shifting like building blocks to the very limits of their inherent compositional possibilities.

Framed in black, the pieces of a pink shirt previously worn by Architect John Miller seem to float weightlessly within AWPCYW’s composition, forming visual sculptures – into bodies that, like a tension-filled structure, pile up the sum of their parts in an act of quiet balance into almost impossible layers of monochrome forms that, surrounded by white, almost entirely renounce their place within an architectural narrative. Only the concrete forms of their reverse sides offer a fleeting reference here to the relationship that the selected fabrics once had with a specific building – in this case, Miller’s Pillwood House in Cornwall – a reference that can only be deciphered within the context of the underlying quilt series, pointing us, as if in silhouette, beyond the boundaries of the visible. Here we see the emblematic remnants of a formal reduction, whose structural details are sewn into the quilts like a drawing.

Image-like bodies, which explore the dense interplay of positive and negative spatial fields open up softly. Their language now entirely determines form and expression and communicates a different, sculptural way of seeing – a process in which, as if in an echo, the parts of two Indian cotton shirts shift into the complex fabric of mirroring abstract image surfaces. Silhouettes of full and empty bodies sensitively explore the roles and traits the shirt’s wearers – two female architects – Annabelle Harty’s mother and Mary Stirling.

Using three works based on a blue jacket belonging to chef Fergus Henderson, AWPCYW examine the status and nature of their own quilting process. The boundaries of the textile constructions shift once more and, drawing on the heavily solarised fragments of the worn jacket, they transform Henderson’s portrait into the depths of three-dimensional form, somewhere between relief and collage. Held together solely by the quilting stitches, these works, presented as wall pieces, engage in dialogue with the freely suspended quilts to present the different, now expanding, textile language of Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way. One that sublimely questions the status and quality of the quilts in a dialogue between functional object and artwork through the language of textile communication, allowing the form of the referred person to be legible as an intimate portrait, much like a room within the dense structure of textile architecture, one that, drawing on the question ‘Do you read me?’ from Kubrick’s fictional narrative, reformulates the questions of visibility and communication within the limits of the used clothes.

Philipp Fernandes do Brito