Tom Estes

There is little recognition that ordinary people are often engaged in practices that are critical and transformative. The problem is that these moments of liberation rarely break out of the confines of obscurity to become an event. So I started to look at activities and routine behaviours that are perceived as socially acceptable and ways of attaching it to a form of performance. In my work I try to give the spectator and the authorities a central role in the process of deconstructing the genealogical discourses and assuming subject positions by examining the cultural artefacts, the ideological character of the surrounding environment, historical events and narratives, as well as a myriad of different perspectives. For example, sewing has a very long tradition as a feminine, typically domestic, even personalized activity but also as a form of community folk art. Sewing also has more recent associations with Feminist Conceptual Art as well as projects such as the AIDS Memorial Quilt. So the idea of a man who sews immediately raises issues of gender, sexuality and identity. While a suit is a complex indicator of social barriers tied to employment status and income, a hand sewn suit is a traditional emblem of masculine authority. To sew images of leaves and vines onto a bespoke suit could be seen as an environmentalist’s symbolic reversal of corporate encroachment but also as the desire for a ‘Return to Nature’ or as a vehicle for demonstrating a movement toward self-knowledge.I am one of those people who like making jokes or creating gag scenarios to keep myself amused. Humour is an extremely important part of our society and it enjoys a high profile in popular culture. So while there is a tendency to pathologize the unhappiness of life, there is also a tendency to poke fun at it. What fascinates me about comedy or gag structure is the duality of our nature or that two or more opposing natures can exist in a strange kind of balance. I suppose that these divisions are not natural ones and so reflect a limited capacity to comprehend the whole. Along with laughter, the notion of the comic figure particularly interests me. While the identity of successive avant-gardes revolved around the concept of the artist as heroic or Promethean revealer, in ‘Sewing Performance’ I take on the role of the artist turned tragic-comic; a hopelessly romantic figure, who confuses the anonymous urban space with his own private space. As an extension of the loud and luminous system, the performer (me) is blind to his participation in the grand symphony. He is someone who hasn’t yet heard that Modern society doesn’t rest on a little bit of goodwill and a helping hand, but on the ever more complex division of labour.

 

I know I feel rather proud when I can ‘reverse engineer’ something and discover how it works, how it was put together, or how I could improve it. And I suppose most people are looking for a cosy community, a comfortable practical environment that is not hyper competitive but clever and creative. People turning their backs on work, money, the demands placed on them from the cradle to the grave, and working towards a more Earth-friendly, human-centered co-existence. But living in London, it all seems so implausible- a kind of wistful dream- and it is within these tensions that the gag structures lies. The divisions of society have created a need to escape an unjust and traumatizing social structure that pits people against each other. While some protest, others feel powerless in the face of their problems and endure them by disassociating. So instead of staging a situationist disruption, my work affirms the ideological character of the urban space but in the sweetest possible way. “