Perhaps it's an age-old yarn. A twine that binds to the past. In an era where fashion's fast and mending runs second to spending, one sister act hopes to re-frame consumption, Jacob McArthur learns.
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“I can remember the week it happened,” Sophie Honess recalled.
Running op-shops in Sydney with an eye for design could be an artist’s delight, but a few years ago the industry took a turn.
“I opened up five stores in Sydney and it was always beautiful donations, like heaps of vintage, really nice designer pieces,” the now Tamworth-based artist said.
“And then it just stopped and all it would get was K-mart and Nike and no one wanted it.
“It stunk, it peeled.”
But this is not a tale told by thrifty fashonista rebuking the rotten raiment filling the racks, there’s a deeper thread to this weaving yarn.
Sophie and her sister Emily have recently teamed up to teach Tamworth a thing or two about the value of production, creation and ditching the throwaway culture shrouding couture and consumption generally.
Working on it
The Honnes sisters have been running loom weaving classes during August, under the name “Fern House Workshops”.
While the workshops are helping people hone the craft of weaving, it also serves as an homage to old skills and hopefully leads to reprisal of handy work in modern life.
They’ve been run out of the Yinarr Maramali cultural centre on Brisbane Street, a place established for Gomeroi women to practice weaving.
Emily, whose background involves “a bit of training and sustainable fashion”, explained the link between practice and theory.
“So it’s kind of two-fold where we’re coming from it,” she said.
“We’ve done a bit of research into the history of weaving, we’re in no way experts, but basically every civilisation has some form of weaving, whether it’s for fish nets through to the Middle East and Eygpt where they loomed clothing out of cotton or flax linen or wool actually was really popular.
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“From that point of view, we’ve always done it as people, and as women, and since industrial revolution and even more recently the fast fashion movement, the last couple of generations we’ve really lost a lot of those skills.”
Emily said there was a detachment in how people view and value products and it’s a message weaved through the classes.
Participants walk away from the craft nights with a self-made loomed artwork and hopefully a newfound perspective.
“So we’re just detached from the process,” Emily said.
“Mass-produced clothing, like from K-Mart, they say they use sustainable Australian cotton, but then it is sold for $3, so we’re sort of not valuing the process, the product, where it’s made, who makes it.
“Getting people to think about that is one of the things we hope to get out of it.”
Nothing laid to waste
The message of sustainability runs through much of the work the Honesses do.
Sophie’s weavings which have been finding homes hanging on walls in Tamworth and abroad, have been made with largely reclaimed material.
“Last year, I bought up big,” she said.
“I spent a whole month just taking up everything from the op-shops that I could.”
Sophie’s stockpile, once it makes its way to an artwork, has also been crafted and created on “up-cycled” looms and needles, laying nothing to waste.
“The looms are reclaimed timbers that have been felled or scraps from a timber mill for example,” Emily said.
“We use needles that are up-cycled chop sticks or knitting needles that have a hole built through it.
“So everything is recycled or thoughtful.
“We talk about that too, when you’re working on it, we just haven’t gone and bought stuff, everything is thoughtful.
“The threads we use, a lot of them are from op shops, sometimes we do add more if we run out, but we try and avoid it.”
Individual activism
Like a piece of fibre-based art, cultural change starts from a single line, a single step.
The sisters say sustainability has been a long-term passion and discovering new ways to cut waste was an ongoing project.
“What we’ve noticed is climate change, or big issues, they’re hard for us as individuals to think we can change anything,” Emily said.
“When you look at the change process, sometimes it’s logging, sometimes it’s front-line activism.
“What we’re looking at is, starting that journey from your first steps could be easier and more accessible for an individual by looking at your everyday practices.
“Think about secondhand, think about avoiding fast fashion and think about handmade and that’s how it’s come together.”
Adding more strings to the bow
Shows like ‘War on Waste’ have given sustainability a platform in recent years and the message is being disseminated through schools at early ages, the pair have found.
“[The kids], they know about plastic, I think that’s covered pretty well in the school and they were sort of on board straight away,” Emily said.
It’s one of the areas Fern House wants to grow.
They have carried out workshops with kids in school holiday programs, creating shopping bags out of old t-shirts and finding uses for the off cuts.
“We would like to go into schools and broaden our scope of workshops we run and not just loom weaving,” she said.
“I’d like to look at waste products in particular and up-cycling simple projects like re-framing waste.”