Packages

To Serve. To be Pure and Fresh. To Lure.

These posters are an exploration in the use of handcraft as both a technique and idea. The act of sewing and the materials used hold social, economic and cultural relevance which complement and contradict each other in the final artifacts. 

Mundane packaging for cleaning products, beauty products and food are taken out of their usual context and turned into something extraordinary. The posters encourage the reader to pay attention to material and technique and to make associations depending on their own personal history. Each piece that make up these posters is carefully selected based on colour and content and is arranged to spell out a word. The poster that spells “LURE” is comprised of beauty packaging, including: makeup, makeup-remover, perfume, anti-aging, anti-acne and anti-odour products. This comments on the pressure society puts upon women in regards to their body, their appearance and their behavior through everyday products.

The juxtaposition of consumer goods packaging with sewing encourages a rich discourse between the two modes of production. The act of sewing together pieces of consumer packaging is a comment on how corporate logos and slogans have become part of our homes (our domestic, private lives) and part of who we are. The posters expose how the consumption of products has become naturalized. 

Meaning is also held in the labour and assembly and in the case of these posters the struggle. Machine-sewing paper leads to several technical problems – the stitching is not straight, the pieces are not aligned and the varying thicknesses and materials used adds to the clumsiness and fragility of the artifacts. The result is in direct contrast to the conventional notion of perfection in machine-made objects. The fact that these posters buckle and curl can be seen as a lack of ability on the part of the maker but, in fact, directly co-relates to the rhetorical ideas that these posters suggest—that imperfection is ok.

These works were done as part of my thesis done at York University and weres shown in my personal exhibit Mending at Gravenfeather in 2015.

They are available for sale: click here