Fragments, Traces, and Belongings; Archives and the Power of Productive Doubt

This essay draws on my project The Afterlives of Clothes to explore artist’s responses to fragmentary garments in museum archives. Presenting these damaged and incomplete garments as indexes of an absent body, as fragments which act on the viewer as distributed parts of the self, it examines how artists use fragments of garments to make present absence, bodiliness and grief. More broadly it asks if the ambivalence these damaged garments create and embody might be used to