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Photos by Killaloe man Peter Lacey

Unknown stories, connection with strangers, how to visually convey communication of stories?

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Photos of Killaloe bridge

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Archive of old photos of Killaloe

Fragmented remnants, photos as receipts

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Email from Michael Murphy, grand-nephew of Jim Bourke, owner of the receipts

‘Seen the lives behind the receipts’

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‘The Long Note’ By Helen Cammock, 2018

Understanding and breaking down a strangers story, eleveating unheard voices, creating a non-linear, disjointed narrative through visuals and found footage/objects

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Images of Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn

TRASHSPEAK, non-verbal communication & unity between strangers through discarded items, respect for one another, united through rubbish, visual references for fragmentation, discarded items, aging etc.

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Sketchbook page recording setting of Killaloe

How can I earnestly and sensitively piece together somebody elses’ story? What information can I gain from receipts, what will I have to infer? Am I in the position to infer?

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I would define my area of expertise as very technical, with an interest in pattern cutting and men’s tailoring for fashion. To best utilise this, I want to ensure a strong focus on design development through physical testing, giving myself time to push myself with pattern cutting and toiles. An interesting way to attempt to be more experimental in terms of pattern cutting and relate to my overall concept could involve second hand patterns, or possibly taking pattern pieces meant for different garments, and combining them to create something new, and tell a new story. There would also be interesting draping opportunities by using discarded 2nd hand garments, all from the same person, or, from multiple sources, and combining them to create a style or garment which could illustrate a narrative, or vice versa. Other techniques which could signify this idea of piecing together a story could include methods of binding objects together which do not belong, patchworking discarded documents or textiles and draping or testing with insignificant, everyday objects. 

I enjoy relating clothing to regular human lives, rather than extraordinary events and visual references, and finding immense beauty in their regularity, which remains especially relevant, seeing as clothing is ultimately an everyday item. Due to this I have found some of my favourite pieces from foundation so far have included recognisable garment references which have been subverted and combined in different ways to express a concept, such as in my Folk project, where coats and scarves morphed together to convey the overwhelming, weighted feeling of layering up. 

The project I enjoyed the most in terms of starting point and subsequent experimentation was Bad Taste, where I looked at finding the beauty in something seen as uninspirational, which was in this case, caravan parks. I found looking for inspiration for garment shapes and techniques in something that is not already garments far more challenging and interesting, and it allowed me to create with a fresh originality and generate lots of unique ideas, which I hope will be the same for this project. 

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My initial response to my starting point was to research into the history of receipts, when I discovered that the oldest surviving piece of writing in the world is a receipt for clothing from 5,000 years ago; cuneiform pressed into a clay tablet. Although Dr Irving Finkel, curator of the Middle East Department at the British Museum argues ‘The origin of writing is not very romantic’, I disagree, as it shows our long-standing tendency to organise, keep track of transactions and document moments visually and with materiality. This alternate form of recording formal information visually could lead to interesting design starting points; what other ways can information take form? How could you express the tone of voice of a transaction through the endless possibilities of garment design?

During this research, I came across a small collection of receipts scanned in by a local history club in Ireland, which documented a man's transactions spanning the 1920s to the 1950s, ending in his funeral expenses, and painted a fragmented but faithful life story. After emailing the club to gain access to the full archive, they let me know that the collection was found nailed to the back of a door of a cottage in Killaloe, about to be renovated. Not only are the receipts themselves beautiful, on subtly coloured papers, with handwritten annotations and ornate backs, but I think the story behind them is really exciting, and align perfectly with my interest in the lives of regular people I do not know. This archive could act as an interesting starting point or play more of an important role, with further research into the area and time periods further illuminating this man’s life, which could then be used as inspiration for possible garment references.

I recently visited the Foundling Museum to look at their ‘tokens’: small objects left with babies that mothers could not look after, which acted as proof of family if a claim was made on the child in the future, as their names were changed upon arrival. These tokens ranged from scraps of fabric to coins, charms, padlocks, curios, jewellery and playing cards. I interpreted these objects as official documents, and most importantly, receipts. They show how the transaction at hand was full of desperate emotion and separation, and represent so much more than acting as a simple identifier. Seeing the objects placed neatly next to one another was certainly moving, and their transactional function became irrelevant. I believe our everyday, paper receipts could also warrant an emotional reaction if framed in a way never done before, allowing ordinary human stories to be celebrated as extraordinary.

Seeing the ordinary as extraordinary in art is something I came across in the book ‘MANUFACTURED - The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects’ By Steven Skov Holt & Mara Holt Skov. I was struck by the series of pieces entitled ‘Salvation Ceramics’ by Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym, which consisted of random dishes from Salvation Army thrift stores, all composed and adhered in the same way, but resulting in drastically different sculptures due to the differences in each unique dish. This serves as a really exciting example of bringing together what other people have discarded, binding and glueing together different stories, memories, functions, to create something entirely new, conveying an entirely new message. Additionally, I loved the piece ‘Ficciones de un uso II’, by Liva Marin; 2,200 lipsticks cast into unique, sculptural shapes. Her inspiration for this piece came about due to her keen interest in observing human activity, which led her to notice how every woman wore her lipstick down in a different way, resulting in minute, individual, naturalistic sculptures. Marin sees this piece as an attempt to draw viewers closer into what is already familiar, and appreciate what is often overlooked. I think this is a fascinating exploration into the distinctive imprints we leave on our items,  and how something very commercial and mass produced can, after we’re done with it, represent expressive human activity, not unlike a receipt.

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I have a fascination with receipts, originally because the self-checkouts at my local Sainsbury’s used not to give the choice to not print your receipt, resulting in piles of forgotten receipts left at each checkout. I would then collect them, analyse what was bought and quiz my Dad about the cost of different items. Through this, I began to realise the amount you can tell about a person through their discarded receipt - whether they were single buying a ready meal for one, buying a weekly shop for a family, grabbing a meal deal in the middle of a busy day, or just needed a treat after a bad week (a personal favourite from my collection lists tampons, ibuprofen and chocolate). Alongside what can be interpreted from the items bought, huge amounts of personal information can now be found on a receipt, such as card details, time and place of transaction, discounts, cashier name etc. This small piece of documentation, so often discarded and overlooked, and dying out in favour of electronic receipts, provides proof of a distinctly ordinary human life, and I find the contrast between the transactional, formal tone of a receipt and the greatly emotional narrative it represents absolutely fascinating. 

This led me to wonder: what else could be classed as a receipt? Receipts as we know them document monetary transactions, but on further analysis, they come to represent so much more and provide a small window into a fragment of someone’s day, or life as a whole. What else could fulfil these conditions? Upon finding a box of old photographs of unextraodinary moments taken by unextraordinary people in an antique shop in Brighton, I began to wonder if a photo could be classed as a receipt; a receipt of a moment in time, of a memory. Extending this thought, I decided lots of often overlooked items could be classed as a receipt: clothing, diaries, knick-knacks,  to-do lists. They all act as evidence of a well-lived, well-rounded, and beautifully normal human life, yet they are so often overlooked and seen as unimportant or uninspirational, and often discarded. 

I am currently reading Brian Thill’s book entitled ‘Waste’, which discusses our strange, troubled relationship with the rubbish we push under the rug, leave behind us, and let someone else deal with. I found his chapter on the Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn particularly interesting, which used to be a rubbish dump before larger dumping-grounds became necessary. In recent years, it has become ‘a mecca for local trashhounds, as evidenced by the ornate trash-trees, waste-temples, signs, markers, and bone-and-bottle tableaux’, with people both scavenging for valuable antiques and leaving behind quirky modern knick-knacks. Thill interprets this practise as a form of communication through rubbish, which he coins ‘trashspeak’, between those who came before and those who will come after. I find this concept strangely moving, with something as non-descript as rubbish becoming a powerful vehicle for human connection and ‘a playful but earnest mechanism to speak back to the dead; to assert the continuity of our disjointed present with times before’. I want to instil this idea into my work for this project, by using discarded objects, perhaps receipts, perhaps more, as vehicles for carrying human stories.

I hope to answer lots of questions in the next 8 weeks that have recently been circling my mind. Could you build a person's life story based only on what they leave behind? Would it be accurate or broken? Does that matter? Could and should a person become reinvented through my interpretation of their everyday, discarded, objects? Would I romanticise this person's life, or celebrate its possible plainness? Can a forgotten beauty be found through drawing attention to a life full of regularity? I find these questions extremely exciting, especially in terms of design possibilities. After building a character or story from discarded objects, could garments be constructed around them or based on their life? Would they be fragmented and represent the disjointedness of my source material, or be wearable and beautifully normal?

Another avenue I could consider during the experimentation process is combining discarded objects with different monetary and sentimental values, from different people, settings, and contexts, to create a new character or inspiration for a design process. This would allow for play regarding the value of objects and the juxtaposition of sentiments that do not go together, which ties into my initial starting point of receipts.

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RECEIPTS

Scans from ‘Waste’ by Brian Thill

Exploring communication through rubbish, our distinct relationship with waste, all objects becoming waste/ its unavoidable nature, stories told in the discarded

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Examples from ‘Wearing Memories’, a crowdsourced project by The Museum at FIT

Emotions hidden beneath surfaces, clothing acting as a receipt of a relationship/ the transaction of passing down & altering clothes, clothing telling stories of regular people

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https://exhibitions.fitnyc.edu/fashion-unraveled/

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‘Fashion Unraveled’ exhibition at The Museum in FIT

Finding beauty in imperfections, piecing together a garment/ story using unusual materials with different values and sentiments, expressing information on textiles? Emotional value of clothing/ deep personal relationship - why so often discarded and unloved?

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RECEIPTS

‘It’s hardly a simple undertaking. People contain multitudes, and by multitudes, I mean libraries. Someone might have an overarching narrative for her whole life, and different narratives for different realms of her life—career, romance, family, faith. She might have narratives within each realm that intersect, diverge, or contradict each other, all of them filled with the microstories of specific events.’

‘Life stories do not simply reflect personality. They are personality, or more accurately, they are important parts of personality, along with other parts, like dispositional traits, goals, and values.’

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Further receipts/ documents of interest from James Bourke/Walsh including funeral expenses, doctor’s receipt, raffle ticket and land commision receipt

Rounding out a completed story of a life, shows how much human activity can be tracked thrugh documentation, possibility to research further the area & time period to increase information.

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‘Before’ photos from a house clearance company

What could be learnt about somebody from what they leave behind? What stories can be found/created from piles of discarded everyday objects? Finding beauty in rubbish, visual references for bringing together items that do not belong in a haphazard, unorganized way, should receipts be represented through more organisation?

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Shows the relevance of receipts/keeping track of transactions through history