The ARTIST’S UNIFORM

Textile artist Kirsty Lillico talks to Tyson Beckett about the things in her closet that will probably outlive humanity.

For Kirsty Lillico, an artist from Pōneke/ Wellington, creative inspiration is all around. Music, books, films, art, design of all kinds provides creative inspiration for the artist who uses textiles as her primary medium. Clothing too sometimes becomes a material in her artwork. “Last year I made a series of upholstered collages made from secondhand activewear, to explore the contemporary phenomenon of ‘athleisure’ and what this says about our society and values. I’m interested in the language of clothes and what they mean.”

She is often drawn to robust materials with sculptural potential but earlier this year, on invitation from Threads Textiles Festival, Lillico transformed Yu Mei’s production offcuts into a series wall-mounted upholstered works of various colours that surveyed the bonds between industrial production and fashion’s waste problem.

As she told curator Robert Leonard in a 2019 interview, clothing and architecture, another of Lillico’s major influences, are inter-connected. “They are both protective systems we inhabit that can be used to express identity.”

In 2017, Lillico won the Parkin Drawing Prize, Aotearoa’s premier drawing award for her work State Block, which displayed the floorplan of a 1940s highdensity concrete flat block cut into carpet offcuts and draped in a floor-to-ceiling presentation. Like much of her portfolio the work grappled with ideas of hostility within architecture, inequality, affordability and questioned modernist theories.

YOU CAN POSSIBLY TELL I WAS A TEENAGE GOTH

because there is still a suspicious amount of black crushed velvet in there.

When I was a teenager I made many of my own clothes. My outfits sometimes invited ridicule on the streets of Upper Hutt. People always talk about subcultures as “tribal”, but I didn’t really have many goth friends and the tips I got on music and fashion came from [UK music magazine] NME.

I NOW SEE THIS PHASE AS A TYPE OF PERFORMANCE ART,

a way of signalling to the world that I was against whatever was on offer, the status quo. Which makes it sound negative, whereas in fact it was very empowering, and an escape.

ALL CLOTHING IS COSTUME.

If you are always performing your identity through clothing, is anything really “authentic”? Jeans are what I wear most often, both to the studio and to work (I am an assistant collection manager at Te Papa Tongarewa). A trailing sleeve or hemline is not a good thing when you are scaling a ladder or scrabbling about on the floor.

MY STRONGEST MEMORIES ARE OF THE GARMENTS

that I longed for as a pre-teen but didn’t get: a pair of spandex pants like the ones Olivia Newton-John wore in Grease. Jelly shoes, a puffball skirt, Bubblegum jeans. One of those gold jackets they gave away as prizes on [TV show] That’s Incredible!

THE OLDEST THING IN MY WARDROBE IS A BLUE DUST COAT

(label: Adolphe Lafont) that I bought from a shop in Auckland called Search and Destroy that sells vintage Japanese and French workwear.

I wore it to work but my colleagues seemed a bit taken aback by the (machine oil?) stains so I covered those areas with patches. The fetishisation of clothing worn in a workshop or factory is one of the hallmarks of a post-industrial society. See also Carhartt, Dickies and so on. I don’t wear this in my studio – it’s too nice! I wear a chef’s apron instead.