Jessica Ogden: Still

The Jamaican designer-artist-maker Jessica Ogden has been an influential fashion, textiles and home-wares designer since 1993. Jessica Ogden: Still, relates this through her archive of designs, the collection of contextual reference and familial material. The decision to hold the show in a vacant retail shop reflects an aspect of her design philosophy of re-use and repurposing of pre-used textiles, of garments and material fragments as contemporary cultural statements. The curatorial technique used to extrapolate the meaning of all this was conversation, held primarily between the curator Carol Tulloch, the exhibition-maker Judith Clark and Jessica Ogden. This has proved to be about an interchange of time, history and the personal.

Effectively, Jessica Ogden: Still is a self-portrait. It includes sculptures created by Jessica that combines designs from her various collections. The importance of stitch to her practice is also represented in archival pieces that have been hand-sewn to structures. As Jessica has said: ‘Those stitches hold that time. What you can get from that simple magic is a whole identity.’

• http://www.jessicaogden.com/exhibitions/
• http://professorcaroltulloch.com/