Elizabeth Day and Christopher Dean
The meeting of Elizabeth Day's textile pieces with Christopher Dean 's painted objects in Disintoxication amounts to an intriguing and complex meditation on the processes of memory which underpin consciousness. The medium and the metaphor for this meditation is clothing. One's initial experience of the installation is of a tension between Dean's painted works in which items of clothing are attached and painted over and 'into' canvasses in thick coatings of pink, blue or lilac monochromes, and Day's large pieces where clothes are assembled in phases of disintegration.
On one wall of the gallery Day has arranged a plethora of pre-loved items under a gauze covering which acts to unify the ensemble by blurring the individual items under a filmy haze. On closer inspection the ensemble contains areas where the clothes seem to have unravelled into shapeless masses composed of their constituent textile materiality. This unravelled formlessness becomes comprehensive in the other of Day's pieces These include two large floor piecesone rectangular and the other circular-comprised of fluid patchworks of unpicked jumpers. The rectangular work dominates the second, smaller room in the gallery space while a similar patterning-or rather undoing of patterning covers a - column at the entrance to the show.
These works privilege deformation and disintegration in their encounter with clothing. Clothes are the most immediate and intimate of cultural forms which, as items purchased, made, worn, worn out, discarded, lost and exchanged are integral to one's life-experience and personal history. The size of Day's works emphasise the significance of clothing in this regard. Her reworking of clothing form and material becomes a leitmotif of the processes of memory which inform and deform personal and cultural identity. The