Dai Rees- Carapace

Excess Surface by Judith Clark from http://www.judithclarkcostume.com/


Dai Rees draws our attention to definitions by defying one. Gone is the political mantle of craftsman in support of all those working behind the scenes; behind the scenes of fashion, a world that he inhabited between 1996 and 2002. It seems now more like he was avoiding the definition designer, he was clearly reluctant to be pinned down to one medium. His skillful apprenticeship within different media, so closely associated with a perfection acquired through repetition of techniques did not guarantee this is where he would remain. He has been a ceramicist, a welder, a milliner. He was in 2003 awarded a fellowship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain where he took the extraordinary step of teaching himself a new art, that of Marquetry - a process so at odds with the speed and slickness associated with recent fashion, one that both cleverly acknowledges the idea of a new patronage of the arts, and one that apparently goes back to its roots in 16th century Florence.


Marquetry is the craft of forming a decorative panel of veneers composed of shaped sections of wood veneer (sometimes including bone or ivory, tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl or pewter, brass and fine metals) and applying it to a structural carcass. Marquetry elaborated upon Florentine techniques of inlaying solid marble slabs with designs formed of fitted marbles, jaspers and semi-precious stones. Rees has revisited this technique transferring its process to leather. The exhibition, Carapace, is the first time that the work that has been produced under the research title of 'Patronage, Artisan, Media and Audience: A Model for Twenty-First Century Craftsmanship' has been shown.


This project reveals him to be inescapably a conceptual artist with the added luxury of being able to incorporate his more personal technical skills. Avoiding the applied of applied art has freed him to make connections that would otherwise be impossible, or inconceivable. Despite the clarity of their historical references so eloquently spelled out by Jennifer Higgie in this catalogue, the 8 pieces exhibited in Carapace are neither nostalgic nor are they about nostalgia. Dai Rees as an artist is at the forefront of the British avant-garde and yet the label of craftsman he defends so adamantly is often at odds with our assumptions about his extraordinary sense of design, and his unique intuitions about fashion.


In these dramatic pieces he has entitled 'Carapace', Rees questions what happens when we have an excess of surface. A Carapace protects, it also resists outside influence. We are seduced by the delicate leather floral decoration, and fascinated by its difficulty. What kind of deformations occur when the surface becomes armature and it is abstracted from the body, this is always Rees's starting point. The viewer is simultaneously reassured that the new shapes look rather like the carcass of a cow or a horse, preferring this to more human resemblances and distortions. They are for example reminiscent of Francis Bacon's blurring away from the recognisable figure.


The pieces in fact form a very deliberate sequence; the first carries with it more recognisable sections of tailoring, subsequently a 1950's gown is made up in leather and pieces that are increasingly abstract: neck pieces are derived from a bodice pattern, a yolk has broguing which hung high against the light becomes almost a halo. Their individual titles are importantly suggestive: Casings 1-8, 5 is divided into 'Mother and Child' and 6-8 are a 'Triptich'. The progression is not from sketch to finished object - but almost the other way round - a more recognisable shape becomes less so - more finished within its own terms but also therefore more literally conceptual. Seams become more like scars, sometimes perfectly laced, otherwise stitched with surgical linen. Scars on the outside protect the finest hand painted marquetry inlay on the inside. The paraphernelia of the meat market, the hooks that measure the weight and worth of the meat refer to a wholly different set of practices.


Dress patterns shrink and expand through successive applications of darting, unneeded material gets folded away. Rees's shapes become non-maleable as the leather veneer is built up through lamination. As the surface is constructed he moves further away from the predictable silhouette inherent in the paper 'fashion' pattern- his point of departure - and by doing this he creates an apparent disfigurement. (We are reminded of prosthetics). If we forget that the 2D paper dress pattern would eventually be worn on an ideal body, the shapes are free to be reconfigured. So when the finished shape emerges what we are faced with is a deformed body, more akin to the Bellmer dolls that appear so alien to the marquetry handbooks in Rees's studio, the atelier on the roof of London College of Fashion's Golden Lane site.


There was a sense in which the installation created itself - the hooks and chains, that are supplied to any butchers shop in London have long been Rees's preferred method of hanging his work, creating the centre of gravity, or axis of symmetry, the chain hanging down like an imagined spine, a reminder of the weave of fabric marked so clearly on dress patterns. What I saw in the work from a curatorial point of view was the necessity of not distorting Rees's distortions, or trusting the impulses in the work but at the same time linking the work with a possible critique of fashion and the display of dress.


George L. Legendre's work made me think of the essential unwearability of Rees's pieces. Confronted with the unwearable, objects which draw attention to fashion theory, precisely because they dispense with the desire to own or wear them, and depend on our ability to read or understand them, we have to reconsider the meaning of 'Carapace' and 'Casings'. Rees's work is a proof of what Legendre has called superficial space.