Tim Mitchell: Product

Event description

Product brings together two bodies of photographic artwork created over an entire decade that track the birth and death of our clothes.

The paired bodies of work involved tracing the ‘origin-myths’ of fashion at Paris and Milan‘s Fashion Weeks, through to tracking thousands of garments emigrating from the UK to the Indian subcontinent, to be broken down and finally recycled.

The first body of work was created across six years, when Mitchell was an uninvited artist-in-residence at Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks – having secured access-all-areas privileges to capture life backstage. Here, he provides us with an eye-witness account of how desire is created through enormous spectacle involving multi-million pound budgets.

Mitchell also presents a body of work created with the anthropologist Dr Lucy Norris that plots the processes by which our clothes end their lives – being herded together in warehouses, stripped of their identities and marks of distinction, and shipped to the Indian subcontinent to be broken down.