Sarah Waters- BA (Hons) Fashion
TYWYSOGES
This collection breaks apart my name and stitches it back up into something new. ‘Sarah’ means Princess in Hebrew; ‘tywysoges’ is the Welsh translation. Born and raised in Carmarthenshire, I was taught Welsh before I was taught English, and thus sometimes I feel that Welsh is the language of my subconscious. In this way, the making of this collection has been garbled, poetically-driven and informed by, above all else, intuition and feeling.
I am moved and inspired by the fabrics I find, primarily in my grandparents' houses, making clothes by sensing the inner life contained in a salvaged fragment. The work explores the notion of being a princess in an abstract, existential sense, wherein the ‘Princess’ stands as a symbol of actualized, somewhat lateral femininity and spiritual glamour, pieced together from precious scraps that range from disney baby grows to vintage liberty printed silks. I used various intuitive patchworking techniques in the collection, which felt like an extension of my interest in collage and the notion of ‘remixing’ existing elements to create something new.
My references have been eclectic and diverse, including the novels of Clarice Lispector, ‘The Passion According to G.H. in particular, vintage porn magazines, and the archives of Vivienne Westwood. ‘The Passion According to G.H.’, the story of a sculptress’ accidental killing of a cockroach and the mystical experience that ensues, informed me in communicating this ineffably beautiful, dizzyingly heady and world-smashing revelation in the context of a girly, patched-up rainbow set of looks that are about being made of everything. Some key muses have been Pamela Anderson and Pete Burns, interesting me through their expressions of paradisiacal sexuality, existential discomfort, and piecemeal girlishness.
Most notably, I am obsessed with women and notions of femininity, particularly the ‘image’ of a woman that lives in the mind’s eye. ‘TYWYSOGES’ seeks to explore this fixation in a rather far-flung, melted manner, intended to be as cartoonishly direct as it is foggy and cut-up.
