PORTABLE HUG

Please handle with care. Please wear with friends and chosen family.

Portable Hug takes a look at the necessity of love, comfort and support within human connections and provides an on-the -go outfit to clothe you and your support buddies. Learning from the experience of separation we undertook in the past year or so, this work aims to create a sense of feeling held, an important part of mental maintenance. Psychotherapist Virginia Satir affirmed that “We need 4 hugs a day to survive, 8 hugs to maintain ourselves and 12 hugs to grow.  I have created a soft sculpture that is both wearable and portable to highlight the importance of these needs. This work explores my own deeply personal experience of the Melbourne covid lockdowns and my response to being reunited with friends and chosen family.

I have combined readymade thrifted items and sewn-from-pattern elements, including hand quilted sleeves, with scrap materials and hems, by a combination of machine and hand sewing, to patchwork together a new garment. The items of clothing are made to be worn and performed in but also, as clothes in and of themselves, they reference the body even when it is not present. This work uses the colour palette I often employ in my art practice of pink and blue, one that developed out of my research of queer textiles artists such as LJ Roberts, Paul Yore, Caroline Wells Chandler and Caitlin Rose Sweet. Their precedents inform my practice and the colours pink and blue - traditional assocoiaed with masc and femme identities - are both a callback to the aesthetics of their work, as well as a homage to queer and gender nonconforming identities like my own.

Portable Hug is made to be held, transported and worn. This work is a tactile soft sculpture that ignites ideas of closeness and togetherness. Hands and connection lines symbolise this idea of connection. Inspired by the works of Nicola L, Lindsay Obermeyer, and Si Chan, among others, my work invites the audience to contemplate the interpersonal relationships people hold in their bodies and remember the necessity of these bonds and support networks.