How Amazingly Tenant of Culture Turning Fast Fashion Into Radical Hybrid Sculpture

 

How do you handle your old garments, for sure you throw them away. Did you know that the fast fashion for what you're almost obsessed with, produces six times more carbon emissions per minute than the world drives a car. Indeed the textile industry produces more greenhouse gas emissions than the shipping and aviation industries combined; and in this way you are contributing to environmental pollution.

Hendrickje Schimmel, an artist who works under the moniker Tenant of Culture has a unique way of handling old garment material. She takes garments that have been shed by the fashion system, or the consumer, and uses this deadstock or secondhand clothing to craft sculptural assemblages. By working with found materials, she gives a new life to mundane and ordinary garments. Implementing elements of ‘grossness’ in her designs. Hendrickje works with various materials, which are often disregarded and overlooked by others.

This Dutch artist acts as a bridge between sculpture and old (and sometimes nearly new) textiles. He creates quirky sculptures out of discarded clothing and recycled textiles and shows how provocative these clothes can be.

His aim is to alter an existing garment to a stage where it says something about its essence, yet utilising the ingredients that are already there. The best part of his creation is that you never know what you are going to find once you’ve sliced open a piece. Improvisation is an important aspect of his working method as you can’t really plan ahead for what you will find. Her patchwork practice sheds light on the state of the fashion industry, sustainability and the politics of waste.

"I find it attractive to spend a lot of time with a garment that I found. I don't use personal garments or other people's personal garments. I just use what I find on the streets, in stores, around the house." – Hendrickje told Wallpaper Magazine.

The work of Tenant of Culture (the artistic practice of Hendrickje Schimmel) investigates the ethics and politics inscribed in garments and fashion styles. Departing from aesthetic trends that she locates in aspirational lifestyle magazines, social media or on the streets, Tenant of Culture analytically deconstructs manufactured garments to examine the ways in which conceptual and ideological frameworks materialise in methods of production, circulation and marketing of clothes.

Hendrickje Schimmel, who lives and works in London, UK, practice is characterised by a repurposing of discarded materials to birth new forms in a critique on consumer culture and wastefulness. This artist turning fast fashion into radical hybrid sculpture.

With an MA in Design and Textiles from London's Royal College of Art, Schimmel has shifted her post-graduate focus to alternative horizons in the field of fashion, where ideas such as waste, the life cycle of clothes and garment and repurposing win has attained over the more traditional path.

“My work is an embodied way to create an understanding of the full cycle; how something is created, assembled, produced, commissioned, branded, sold and then psychologically obsolete but physically waste. By deconstructing it and finding a lot of resistance within the material, I'm learning things about the material and about the garment that I couldn't have looked up in a book”-she added.

Her work focuses on the institutional archive and surrounding themes such as preservation, decay and cultural hierarchy. She transforms objects by viewing them as scientific or archival, and seeing how people respond to this change, often using square and rectangular shapes to represent the classic form of display.

"I do a lot of workshops with people, where they come by with their garments and make them into new things. It’s an important part of my practice to re-empower people and to show how fashion can be fun. It’s also important that if you own a certain garment, that’s not necessarily the end of its life cycle. You’re renting it, in a way, because it will outlive you. My interventions are more part of this cyclical nature, just like trends are cyclical. A garment has many lives."-Hendrickje.

Schimmel also won the 2020 Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize with Frieze creates cross-bred art-meets-couture sculptures that are at once monstrous and sumptuous. The artist’s work illustrates an industry of extremes and dissects the psychology of break-neck fast fashion and a material world of rapid obsolescence.

Hendrickje Schimmel draws upon her training in women’s wear to raise questions about the development of trends, as well as the often opaque means of production in the industry. Her uncannily embodied sculptures loom like spectres of an uncertain future, one where we have all been seduced into buying into a fantasy that never quite feels real.

“There is an endless fascination in every single garment, which can’t necessarily be told. It’s not just about what is wearable.”- Schimmel said.

Tenant of Culture was selected from the 35 galleries from 21 countries in the Focus section of the Frieze Viewing Rooms, the fair’s celebrated section supporting younger galleries and artists in earlier stages of their careers. The artist’s largest installation to date, it draws directly on the history of the gallery, and stitches together complex stories of gendered domesticity and the hierarchies of supply and demand. 

You can see some of her best works here..