2012
Poul Brouwer
  • SUMMARY
graduate of Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam

About the collection

My collection is inspired by the sense of shame that I relived when I was flipping through my childhood photo album. In two pictures I can tell I felt caught by the camera. I recall the sense of shame I experienced as a child, secretly playing and listening to certain music, like my mother’s Spice Girls album. I was well aware that my preferences were not exactly the norm. To me shame is about the covering up of ones true identity, and therefor loosing one’s identity.

 

On a very uninspired day I was smoking under the porch outside.  It was raining and I noticed how the water ran between the tiles, changing the colors and smoothing out the grid. I reproduced the grid on a white cotton fabric with a black marker and soaked it in water expecting the lines to become faint. Instead, the black lines turned into beautiful colors blending into one another.

I am in fact a very colorful person even though I may look just as serious as those black lines did. For the shape of shame I started wrapping myself in blankets and taking pictures. Then I got myself a ‘Ken’ Barbie and continued my search for shapes working on him with little scraps of fabric. This approach resulted in a series of coats and sweaters. All garments are basically made from one piece of fabric. Certain features like seams twisting around the arm are directly derived from the wrapping technique.