Tailor Tacks
Marking darts and other stitching elements allows the tailor to match lining and outer pieces, leading to a good fit. The tailor tack is vital for marking up fabrics, but also needs to be easily removed upon completion of the garment. Thus, the oversized stitches are a looped form of the back stitch. Catherine has worked her stitches in Tailor Tacks with multiple threads to further emphasise the loops and free ends.
Always interested in structure and form, she plays with the ways in which waxed linen bounces away from the stitch holes using this marking system to highlight the sculptural form of the tailor tack, allowing the threads and fabrics to articulate the space formed by this stitch.
Tacking
In her 3-minute looped video, Tacking, Catherine considers the tailor tack in formation. She is interested here in how the repeated action of hand stitching becomes a meditation of the rhythms formed between hand, needle, thread and cloth. Layered imagery is used here to emphasise this repetitive movement, but also to suggest the ways in which this stitch is used as a marking system before the construction of the garment to hand, the threads removed at the end of the process. In this sense, they are vital structural elements but invisible to the wearer and audiences for the garment. This echoes many textile practices, such as weaving, stitching, pattern drafting and tailoring, practices that sit at the heart of the industry, but hidden from public view.
