Current Exhibition

Exhibition 4: Enmesh

Curator: Alexia Marmara

Date: 2nd December 2024 - 4th January 2025

"'The Archive is this kind of place that [has] to do with longing and appropriation. It is to do with wanting things that are put together, collected, collated, named in lists and indices; a place where a whole world, a social order, may be imagined by the recurrence of a name in a register, through a scrap of paper, or some other little piece of flotsam.'
      - Carolyn Steedman

Personal archives are borderless and unlimited visions of the past and contain invaluable testimonials to the unfixed nature of our worlds. The objects within Enmesh are points of entry into disjointed and hospitable narratives. There is an entrenched connectivity within self and what we encounter through archival objects that opens internal and private passages: a collection of disused cloth, paper or metal becomes a means of constructing and understanding self-hood on top of disused artefacts. Though being surrogates for the vanished past, it is the trust in the beauty and strength of these archives that has enabled a variety of artists and keepers to translate them all into new contexts. Despite its crumbling, shattering or disappearance, the vulnerability of the archival piece finds new power. Through the work of the artists, archivists and fashion designers featured in Enmesh I have traversed the ways in which these virtuosos have enfleshed archives and enmeshed themselves within.  Tightly squeezed together and pulsating separately within a small window, consider this a petri dish of precious components of the ever expanding worldwide dust hysteria and archive fever." (Alexia Marmara, 2024)

Enmesh (2nd December 2024 - 4th January 2025) is an exhibition exploring evolving negotiations between self and archives, curated by Alexia Marmara (co-curator and co-programmer at The Horse Hospital; previously HYMAG).

You Should Have Been There (Rachelle Francis, 2023)

detail, refurbished found photograph (Chris Neate)

detail, repurposed Victorian linen robe (Indépendantes de Cœur par Valériane Venance)

Previous Exhibitions

Exhibition 3: PROTRUSION: a collaboration with the artist Samuel Eyles

Curator: Cyana Madsen

Date: 6th September 2024 - 19th October 2024 

In the painting REQUIEM FOR A BROKEN BOWL (2020), one of the most intimate and utilitarian garments, the sport sock, becomes a symbol of self-loathing, indignity, and solitude. In response to this painting by multidisciplinary artist Samuel Eyles, Cyana Madsen has curated PROTRUSION: a collaboration with the artist Samuel Eyles (2024).

This installation materialises Eyles' fraught emotional world by producing a series of ribbed cotton talismans to boredom, repetition, and filth. The socks crawl out of the canvas to transform Eyles' symbol of shame into a coveted object which is beautiful, functional, and provides tactile pleasure.

REQUIEM FOR A BROKEN BOWL is not for sale, and Eyles' practice is now focused on writing and filmmaking. Each pair of socks thus becomes both an essential part of the exhibition design, and an editioned work. Socks are available to purchase through AWMS, and will be delivered to owners after the exhibition closes on 19th October 2024. Each pair will uniquely reflect the impact of exposure on their colouring and structure: embodying and memorialising the ephemeral nature of practice and display.

In celebration of MADSEN SYLVESTER STUDIO’s first collaborative project, a durational event was held on the evening of Friday, 6th September 2024 and will be exhibited until Monday, 9th September 2024. Visitors to the private view of PROTRUSION: a collaboration with the artist Samuel Eyles were invited to contribute a participatory response to Eyles’ painting Iv changed Sam, I wear a hat now (2018). Using discarded glassware they had drunk from, visitors created their own protrusion in the membrane between the world rendered on Eyles’ canvas, and the exhibition space.

Exhibition 2: Curare, or toward a studio ethos

Curator: Cyana Madsen

Date: 28th July 2024 - 4th September 2024 

Madsen Sylvester Studio is a space for exhibiting any aspects of the wide remit of the dressed body and fashion, and for interrogating curatorial methods. In establishing the studio and its focus, I decided that while the studio will host curators and support their exhibitions, it will keep no physical collection. This decision has two motivations: dictated by the considerations and capacity of the space, and ideologically motivated by a need to unsettle and question the hierarchies imposed by collecting methodologies.

As a site of experimental praxis, the studio ethos must be explicit in its intention to provide a creative working space to fashion curators. Yet, I acknowledge that this ethos is generated from my own research and experience, and is therefore open to questioning from external practitioners, to ensure its ongoing relevance and utility.

The initial mandate for Madsen Sylvester Studio is that:

·      the exhibitions on display at the studio will temporarily highlight a research or personal preoccupation of the specific fashion curator working with the space;

·      all visiting curators will be asked to provide a biography which contextualises the exhibition in relation to their practice;

·      while at the studio, any objects will be cared for and presented to a standard agreed in dialogue with the visiting curator, the commissioning curator, and any relevant stakeholders;

·      the studio will not operate as a permanent site for storing fashion histories.  

Curare, or toward a studio ethos thinks about what it means to be a curator without a collection. Is it the location, the objects, or the act that makes us? When not in functional use, the curatorial tools on display: the archive box, acid-free tissue, measuring tape, pencil, nitrile gloves become disembodied objects of dress themselves. Without a collection to document and store, they are both remnants of the performance of collections care, and the materialised symbols of the curator’s implicit promise to care for objects.

Exhibition 1: Introducing the Dressed Self

Curator: Cyana Madsen

Date: 1st July 2024 - 24th July 2024

“[…]we may take the term 'personal front’ to refer to the other items of expressive equipment, the items that we most intimately identify with the performer himself and that we naturally expect will follow the performer wherever he goes. As part of personal front we may include: insignia of office or rank; clothing[…]” 

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956, p. 14)

In his mid-20th century study of human social life, Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman proposed that we individuals live our lives in a state of constant performance. To participate in social life we continually perform our version of reality for our audience, the society of observers which surround us, and we perform this reality for ourselves.

White cotton t-shirt with hand drawn self-portrait (c. 1987)

Worn to elementary school, 1987-1988.

An essential aspect of this performance is how we construct and conduct ourselves through our personal appearance, an appearance which includes our clothing. The garments we choose to wear in public, those we don in private at home, and even those that we would never dare to wear in front of even our closest loved ones are all part of this performance of the self.

Black suede block heel shoes with black grosgrain ribbon “Miu Miu” (c. 2014)

Worn on various nights out, 2017 - 2024.

If our clothing informs how we are positioned in the social world and thus how we experience the world around us, it also collects the marks and signs of this experience in its material: the soles of our shoes become worn as we walk through town; our trousers crease around the knees as we move; from our actions in everyday life we get stains, marks, and holes in our clothing.

Black cotton drill boiler suit with metal zipper (c. 2018)

Worn to defend PhD thesis, 2023.

Using items of worn clothing from the collection of curator Cyana Madsen, this installation considers how the clothing of the “Public, Private and Secret” (Eicher, 2020) selves come together to create our social identity, and in the process, collect the memories of our worn experience in the material.

Grishko Pro pointe shoes (c. 2016)

Worn for weekly pointe class, 2016-2017.

Beginning with this exhibition of worn clothing, the vitrine window of Madsen Sylvester Studio will be an experimental site for curators, artists, and researchers to explore all aspects of clothing, the self, and our world through a rotating series of installations and interventions.

Pink velvet slippers embroidered with gold wire lamb of god CMS crest (c. 2018)

Worn constantly, 2018-2024.

Further reading:

Eicher, J. (2020) ‘Dress, the Senses, and Public, Private, and Secret Selves 1’, Fashion Theory, 25(4), pp. 1-21.

Goffman, E. (1956) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre.

Sampson, E. (2020a) Worn: Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear. Bloomsbury Publishing: USA, 2020.

Stone, G. (1995) ‘Appearance and the Self’, in Eicher, J.B., Johnson, K.K.P. and Roach-Higgins, M.E. (eds.) Dress and identity. Reprint. New York: Fairchild Publications, pp. 19-39.

Exhibitions & Workshop.

Ramsgate, UK.