Erin Manning: I’ve been working with patent leather which is a lot thicker - so it’s easier. This softer leather is hard because it has a kind of pull. When you’re sewing it’s challenging because it puckers. The trick for leather is how to cut it. Your pieces never come in a standard size, so that’s challenging - so you don’t look like you’ve made patchwork.
Unfortunately I’ve been struggling with moths. My whole comme des garcons collection has been destroyed. So my clothes are all imprisoned in bags, in bags, inside bags. And still, all you need is one fucking moth. And they particularly like cashmere, and two years ago I made an entire collection in cashmere. They like comme des garcons and cashmere, you know.
Q: [Laughs] Have you ever done any mending to the moth holes?
EM: I have, or I make more holes. Generally I make more holes. I mend them but you can always tell, The problem is if you want a kind of maximal aesthetic the mending works. But it doesn’t tend to be my aesthetic.
It is also definitely an aesthetic, once you start making more visible mending. It can be really beautiful. But it does change the piece. When you have as many things as i have, because i’m sewing all the time, it's physically impossible to get through everything I own. Now I have two houses with two completely different wardrobes. Up north, which is more canvas and work clothes. I started there with nothing, and felt like a minimalist - but, put me close to a sewing machine and, well…
Q: Tell us about your space, what you do in here, and how you learnt some of these skills.
EM: Well I never learnt anything formally. My grandmother and my mom made clothes. I was a really different body shape than other kids around here. I’m so much taller, so I started sewing very young. It’s hard to remember the degree to which things have changed in stores, but it was really impossible to find clothes that were long enough for me. My friends were just so small. My mom said I was sewing at 3, I was always remaking things. Of course as a child I was mostly cutting things up and remaking things.
My mom did sew, not as committed as my grandmother, but she was good. She’s an artist. So, I always did it, never thought of it as art. I had a boutique with 5 other people in the 80’s. We came together around collections, so each of us took care of one collection over a 3 month period. But it was pretty clear to me quickly that it wasn’t the way I worked best. When you’re doing that you have to repeat, and you have to make things really perfectly. What people like isn’t what’s interesting to you often. So, I’ve really resisted for a long time any kind of sale of the work that I do.
Then I got a job at Concordia, (as a professor of philsophy) and at that point i was a painter and a sculptor, but i found it really challenging to teach and paint and sculpt and write and supervise, because I felt like the painting and the sculpting required a separation, a quiet space, which i just didn’t have. At one point I was talking to a colleague, and she said what about your clothing? And I said, no that has nothing to do with it.
But then I started a conceptual piece that I worked on for 7 years that I called slow clothes. This was an enormous piece. It was a collection of about 2000 pieces that were cut in a way that they could facilitate the making of any kind of garment: with buttons, button holes and magnets.
What I was thinking of when I made slow clothes was that most people don’t have access to design. We moved in the post second world war to prêt-a-porter. There were great aspects of it because what it allowed for was a democratisation of clothing, but what it instituted was the organisation of the woman’s body in particular.
With prêt-a-porter you have the inception of sizing. It’s always organised itself with a ratio that’s predictable: Waist to bust to hips, which is always measured according to the same ratio. From size 6 to 8 to 10, the only difference is that it’s a little different across the same ratio. But if you look at most women, they don’t have a ratio that works that way. For men, the ratios are much more forgiving, unsurprisingly.
What I wanted to do with this project is set up a proposition where there is no body that’s presupposed. So, you could build your own clothing. So there were about 2000 pieces handmade: they were full of magnets, very strong ones, that facilitated the folds. The collection itself is called folds to infinity. The idea is you could pull it out and see something that if you know how to sew has the edge of a pattern. So it took me a bit of time to figure out what kinds of movements in the fabric could be conducive to more than one kind of garment.
That was the segway from making clothes to thinking about it conceptually. Since then my work has become more abstract in terms of textiles. I’ve been making rugs. Then of course the loom. So I've been making the fabric. I’ve moved to the next stage where I could work from the beginning to the end of the process: make the fabric, then make the garment out of the fabric.
Though, what I'm finding that I'm most attracted to is not what is most interesting - so I’ll do a plain black weave. Then when I make things that are more colourful and complex, then make a garment, I haven’t worn them. The way I think about the relationship between the studio and the sewing room is that making clothing keeps me honest. Clothing has real constraints, either it works or it doesn’t work. When I'm making something more abstract I could get lazy. By forcing myself to be in a relationship to the specificity of the garment, I keep a certain kind of intuitive geometry for myself.
Q: Do you feel like in order to have that exploratory approach, that it’s necessary to have a certain degree of experience? Did you just figure it out over time, or did you have experience working from patterns, then find the freedom to explore more?
EM: I really can’t work from a pattern. I did once in 40 years of sewing. I’ve written a lot about neurodiversity, it’s just not how my body works. I had an enormous amount of shame about it: why can’t I work from this flat organisation, but it’s just not how I am.
I work completely organically. Usually what I do is make a cut in the fabric - I like to have as little leftover fabric as possible, so there’s a constraint that I’d like to not throw anything out. So from the cut, the garment begins to emerge. That’s of course not always true. - when i'm making pants, I’ve made 1000 pairs of pants. I can make pants in my sleep, I know my body so well. I can look at the fabric and within 30 min I have a pair of pants.
This would be an example of the patent leather. I’m making this and I have a feeling for what I want, but it sort of emerges. What I’m thinking is it would be nice to have a coat with a cotton lining, then I wouldn’t have predicted that I’d make the collar this way. But it turns out that when I have it on, there’s something really interesting about this line. It’s padded as well, it has wool padding.
Q: It’s so fun!
EM: So it’s not that I don’t know that I'm making a jacket, I do. But I don't know if this is the way I’m going to finish it. It’s always growing. I’ve never made a purse before, but recently I made this one: It doesn’t have quite as much shape as I wanted, but It’s not bad. Generally I’ll make 10 of them. I’ll think, if the leather had been thicker I’d get a better shape. This year I’m into coats.
A couple years ago I was working with really beautiful yarns. I made a whole series of things with no fabric cuts. The question of “how to sew something without having any leftover fabric”. Part of it is that Montreal has changed, we don’t have the fabric stores anymore. It’s gotten really expensive.
Q: What is your vision for a future you want to build, and how do you envision the relationship to objects fitting into that vision ?
EM: The idea of life being simplified, morally, through a reduction of objects - because the objects stand in for capitalism: It’s moralizing in the sense that you have more tha
n you need. You wouldn’t say to someone, please take all the color out of your life, you have too much color. What is the difference between surrounding yourself with things that feel very alive and buying something online and sending it back and it going into a pile somewhere. Those are very different environments.
Years ago I worked with a journalist to talk about how we could be more sustainable in our practices. For me that was never about having less, but rather thinking more emphatically about where things come from. I always try to know the end point from where I’m buying, but that’s not accessible to everyone because it costs a lot more. We can collectively decide to give value to the objects in our lives. If you go to a store and find something that is clearly under the cost, you shouldn’t buy it. But it’s hard to do that in a world where we want more. How do we do that without moralizing or making eachother ashamed? It seems to me you can do that through the care to build a world that feels rich.
The 3 ecologies project is not a back to the land project. It’s about practicing different ways of living so that you can be nimble in the environment in which you live. It’s hard when you live in Montreal to think about your environment. If you're in a forest, you’re thinking about the environment every single day: it’s impossible not to - we’re off grid, we rely on the sun. I can tell you we only had 7 hours of sun from the 1st december to the 12th january because I rely on it. Being in that reliant relationship to it has effects: if I want to use my sewing machine- it takes electricity and I don't have it. If I use the sewing machine then I have to use the generator, which means propane… the steps are more clear. If we can be curious about them, while still saying “today I’m going to use the generator because I desperately need to sew”: it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Then, we can be more nimble.
In this way, the land project tries to amplify the joy side of things. We have a project right now around ceramics. We’re working with someone who’s really interested in working with the land to make the glazes. Going from beginning to end with the materials that are right there. But again, I wouldn’t want to say that you shouldn't make ceramics if you’re going to fly something across the world.
Q: There’s this difficulty of internal tensions, sometimes it feels impossible to feel totally aligned with your decisions. This produces shame and discomfort within ourselves.
EM: Our relationship to this world is so complicated. A way of getting into the world is getting into something that makes it feel possible to leave the house. To leave the house today I need a little bit of gold, or these particular shoes, you know? We don’t tend to talk like that about clothes but I suspect everyone does it. 