Wearable Worlds: Rosie Deacon’s extravagant realms
Rosie Deacon first presented a version of Fashion Forest Seduction in Launceston in January 2019. In a nondescript annex of the local Workers’ Club, up a flight of steel fire stairs, a door opened onto an extravagance of colour, texture and sound. A dense ecosystem was suspended from the ceiling like disco stalactites: row upon row of shimmering tassels; vines of tinsel; clear vinyl polyps encasing rainbow fabric fragments; strung beads like suspended rain. To enter one of Rosie Deacon’s spaces is to be completely consumed visually, aurally, and sometimes bodily.
Above the Launceston Worker’s Club, a black catwalk lolled out from a gaping cardboard maw. For the models in this technicolour jungle, camp was the new camouflage. They stepped out through two glittering fangs in full-length fake fur; a heavy cape encrusted with fake jewels and pompoms; sequins, plastic fringing, gold insulation and inflatable pool toys. These creatures of the Fashion Forest strutted, danced and shimmied, and the effect was joyous and strange. Each outfit was totally absurd, but as they appeared one by one through the pink expander-foam gums of the backdrop mouth and sashayed down the catwalk, it felt totally right.
It turned out those flamboyant figures breezing down the runway weren’t sanctioned ‘performers’. They were regular people from the audience, transformed by dazzling costumes, bright lights and their own sense of becoming someone (or something) else. The distinction between audience and participant dissolved. As with much of Deacon’s collaborative and participatory practice, this work was a shifting, expanding thing that changed each time someone entered and acted within it.
In the language of contemporary art, Deacon makes installations: immersive collections of objects and surfaces that transform a space, and are different in each gallery they occupy. Another way to think about Deacon’s practice is as one of world-building. Sometimes she builds these worlds herself, entirely out of her own head, hands and internal landscape. Often, though, this world-building is collaborative, and becomes a collective expression of how and what things could be.
This iteration of Fashion Forest Seduction is unique in that it has been constructed specially for the spaces at Wollongong Art Gallery. It has also been shaped by each person who assisted in its construction, during a series of workshops in the preceding weeks. In devising this particular world, Deacon worked with groups of local young people with intellectual disability or cognitive difference, from local schools and through Greenacres Disability Services. For both Deacon and her collaborators, the process of making artwork can be calming and cathartic, in particular through elemental tasks like threading, binding, stitching and cutting. Through an immersive process of chatting, layering, playing and building, Deacon and her collaborators bring out whole inner worlds.
In the past Deacon has collaborated with artists from Studio A, a supported studio in Sydney for artists with disability. Their first project together, produced for Underbelly Arts Lab + Festival in 2015, was intuitive, focused and passionate. Starting with something each artist was drawn to – a colour, animal or object – they re-iterated this thing over and over using cardboard, foam, poster paint, rope and clay, pushing the idea to its maximal conclusion. These artists created worlds for audiences to enter: messy, encompassing spaces that were not polite or refined, and that spoke so boldly that no words of explanation were needed.
An ongoing collaboration between Deacon and Emily Crockford[1] has seen them exhibit in Paired, a group show at Firstdraft, Sydney. Paired curator Harriet Body speaks of an "equalising space"[2] between artists with and without disability that true collaboration can enable. Alongside this, there is the transformative potential of art, both as a therapeutic activity and a way to change how we perceive and understand the world around us. The making process can shift things for the artists, and through the finished work, audiences can enter into the maker’s world. Many of the wearables in Fashion Forest Seduction at Wollongong Art Gallery have been made by Deacon’s collaborators, and by placing them over our heads and on our bodies, we get a sense of what it is to move through the world as someone else.
Process is important in Deacon’s practice, but there is also a very particular material language that defines her work. The language is bright, textured and excessive, its lexicon constructed with offcuts from industrial and commercial manufacturing. Deacon changes the meaning of these materials through her work – once-rejected castoffs become enticing, evocative and fun – and the meaning of her work is also derived, in part, through these materials of choice. Like the materials she chooses, the work Deacon makes is not precious or rarefied. This looseness, however, is not to be confused with negligence: the raucous, spontaneous nature of Deacon’s work often belies the labour that goes into its creation.
The materials might be synthetic and shiny, but the intent is warm and earnest. There is pageantry and performance in the scenarios devised by Deacon and her collaborators, but there is no trickery or pretence, no attempt to coerce or confound. All the artifice is upfront, and we are included in it. These constructed worlds have their arms wide open, and this is an enormous part of their ineffable appeal.
Fashion Forest Seduction will morph and evolve with each member of the audience who assembles an outfit, shape-shifts into someone (or something) else, and parades down the runway. For Deacon, to perform a character is to communicate without words, and here she provides us an opportunity to say what we will under the disguise of extravagant wearables, using the language of our bodies in space.
Rosie Deacon Fashion Forest Seduction was held at Wollongong Art Gallery from September - December 2019.
[1] Emily Crockford is an artist working from Studio A. www.studioa.org.au/emily-crockford
[2] Harriet used this term when talking about the different sides of her relationship with Thom Roberts: “Part of our collaboration and friendship involves me taking on a responsibility of care for Thom – in a way that is different to how I care for my friends who don’t have an intellectual disability. The intrigue of the working studio space is that when we make art together this element of our relationship largely falls away, making for a more equalising space where we become two artists just riffing off each other’s ideas.” From Harriet Body, Paired exhibition text, viewed at www.harrietbody.com/paired-text.
Image credit: Rosie Deacon, FFS (Fashion Forest Seduction), 2019, Mona Foma, Launceston. Photo: MONA/Jesse Hunniford