Slub is the next iteration of a body of research Tenant of Culture has been developing since early in her career, manifested physically in sculptural form. Primarily, the artist is concerned with the destructive nature of the fast fashion industry, its wastefulness, its toxic and polluting production cycles, and the history of textile production as the pièce de résistance, the driving instrument, of the Euro-American industrial revolution. Here, her critique is expressed through the deconstruction of second-hand clothing, manifesting in the series Smock through ruched, patchwork garments made from discarded pieces of fast fashion. These ‘garments’ on display – dresses made from abandoned sportswear, a gathered T-shirt – echo an aesthetic that might easily be found in the new crop of DIY fashion retail spaces in cities like London, New York and Paris – their work itself, in part, a reaction to mass-produced clothing and a cannibalistic industry which devours the new as soon as it appears. This is another key feature of the artist’s work: she does not shy away from the mining of contemporary aesthetic trends, another facet of her critique on the fashion cycle that produces so much waste. This imitation and repetition remain part of Tenant of Culture’s rich lexicon. Her sense of humour remains ever-present.
One series, however, presents an entirely new body of work. Jane, Ferrero, Osaka and pleasme each adapt the notion of the industrially destroyed garment – its look, its touch, its affect – which goes to the consumer market near destroyed. Whilst in her last solo show at Soft Opening, Ladder, Tenant of Culture referenced the processes of slashing and unravelling in a critique of the pre-distressed, mass-produced garment, these works reference a more conspicuous and omnipresent form of destruction we see on the street every day: distressed denim. Slub refers directly to a continuation of her critique of the mass-produced distressed garment, this word being the name for a type of yarn with intentional irregularities in order to create a fabric with a ‘worn’ effect.