T-Shirt and Jacket - Susie Freeman

Jacket, Susie Freeman, 1981. Image © Nick Moss. Jacket, Susie Freeman, 1981. Image © Nick Moss

Object Details

Date of making: 1981
Date of acquisition: 1982
Technique/Process: Textiles: machine-knitting (pocket technique)
Materials: Nylon thread, found objects
Dimensions: T-shirt L590mm x W550mm; Jacket L810mm x W1350mm
Collection Number: T65A,B

Maker Details

Birthplace: London, England
Place Trained: Royal College of Art, London, MA Textiles, 1978 – 1980; Manchester Polytechnic, Manchester, 1974 – 1978
Studio: 82 Nottingwood House, Clarendon Road, London, W11 4JH, England
Awards: Crafts Council Research Bursary, 1988 Crafts Council Setting Up Grant, 1981
Link: website -->

About

Textile artist Susie Freeman creates clothes, fabric and framed pieces using her unique pocket technique, which she discovered while studying at the Royal College of Art. Using a fine nylon thread she knits an almost transparent double layered fabric with rows of small pockets. In these pieces, Jacket and T-shirt, Freeman places tiny pieces of braid, ribbon and sequins in the pockets. Her work is an important example of art textiles within the Crafts Council Collection; the items in the pockets embracing concepts of memory, emotion and narrative.

Most recently, this work was shown in ‘Turned and Twisted’, an exhibition featuring loaned works from the Crafts Council Collection, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery in 2011.

Malcolm Garrett
says...

“The two Susie Freeman garments in the Crafts Council Collection feature her signature machine-knitted pocket fabric. Housing differing types of object, they blend an inherent rigidity and the ambiguities of their meaning with the flexibility of the material. I like them as much for how this original technique has developed in subsequent years as for their creative and technical ingenuity.

Blurring the boundaries between craft, art and social commentary, Susie creates a unique canvas, equally at home in an art gallery or museum collection. Her thought-provoking work Cradle to Grave, now in the British Museum, develops the technique pioneered in these garments. With a single unbroken thread, knitted into a 13-metre-long piece of fabric, it encapsulates a normal lifetime's consumption of medications.”