A YEAR OF MINDFUL MENDING
In this year long practice organized with Textile Arts Los Angeles, we explored mending techniques, approaches to transforming garments, piecing, patching, and slow stitching as we created a sewn book or sampler that can be added to and worked on over the year.
We also discussed a more thoughtful approach to our consuming and our relationship to our clothes and fashion. Between sessions there were projects and ways to incorporate the practice of mending into your daily life.
Our last meeting for 2019 was on November 3rd. For the finale we played the “Golden Joinery Game.” An approach to seeing the beauty in the repair is to embrace the idea of Kintsugi or “Golden Mending” which celebrates the story of the repair and the visible mend. Read more under the gallery of images.
In this time of overwhelm where the environment is facing so many perils, mending what we can and joining in community is truly very healing.
“GOLDEN JOINERY is a non-commercial, collaboratively developed clothing brand, initiated by Dutch fashion collective Painted Series. Both in playful workshops and the GOLDEN JOINERY game, you are invited to repair a dear but broken garment with gold. Touched by the Japanese technique Kintsugi, where broken porcelain is visibly healed with gold, Painted Series started to translate this gesture to fashion. Kintsugi means golden joinery. Celebrating the story of your garments with golden scars, a second layer is added, putting into question the monopoly of fashion labels. Now the Golden Joinery game enables the brand to reach out to more people. PAINTED SERIES makes sharp contemporary couture in which handwork finds a place of honour and likes to explore new ways to make and present fashion.”
