God Bless Grey Jersey / Where We Are Now

Suzanne Elven

Summary
Final work

My practice attempts to make momentary interactions three dimensional, acting as a love letter to people who pass through my life and impress on me. My relationships, platonic and romantic, consistently come into what I make. The contemporary moment is important to my practice: the humour in the absurdity of right now, but also the sentimentality. The drawn out moments within everything else, that is fast pace. My relationships, platonic and romantic, consistently come into what I make. Whilst I feel very connected to right now, my practice navigates time at an angle, merging visuals of current culture with those of the past, usually of the 1970s, a time which I associate with my parents being my age. From this temporal dislocation, I hope to engage our collective memory. I aim for the work to become a point of contact; between my own subjectivity and the viewer’s, between my friends and I, between different places and timelines.I gravitate towards the use of casual clothing, exploringit as a tool of reclamation, and belonging. I construct the garments myself, following the processes of garment production. After this, I take the garment out of the context of ownership and consumption by removing the wearer. The omission of a wearer intends to hint at the absence of a person or community, but is also suggestive of the space which is yet to be taken up. My lens-based work is constructed in installation form, and works in tandem with my sculptural work, grounding symbols of subculture in my personal subjectivity.

My practice attempts to make momentary interactions three dimensional, acting as a love letter to pe...

CollegeCentral Saint Martins
CourseBA (Hons) Fine Art
Graduation year2025

Clothing is often conflated with the idea of the individual, a singular owner and wearer, but I consider clothes which situate the individual in relation to the group. The grey jersey I foreground in this showcase exists in many of my friends’ wardrobes, and thus is often a mark of arrival. Athleisure is a portal to subculture, and the boundary between place and person. I’m interested in athleisure's social function, a receptor of ideas of social progress, and its promotion of an almost androgynous culture. There is something erotic about grey jersey: the way it tallies our movement as it absorbs sweat, and how it drapes over the contours of the body. This is a tribute to important friends, and the grey jersey on them.