This coat is an intentional effort to execute research through practice, an exploratory project aimed at testing the potential of combining my artistic and intellectual practices into one intertwined mode of conducting research in the future. I already do this intertwining indirectly as my art and scholarship have been connected but separate for most of my professional life until fairly recently. With this coat, I am attempting to understand how to walk between artist and academic, in the footsteps of artists such as Sonia Boyce and Eddie Chambers, amongst others.
For this coat, I have applied several things surrounding my Terra Foundation funded doctoral research on the late fashion designer, Patrick Kelly, as well as my time as a fellow in the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have combined my exploration of Kelly’s reappropriation of the pickaninny figure in his fashion designs, my understanding of black radical art practice in relation to Kelly’s work, my research-led practice at the Costume Institute on kitsch and how it intersects with camp aesthetic in 1980s high fashion, and being inspired by their previous exhibition, In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, particularly the use patchwork quilting in high fashion.