Sheree Dornan - Living Art

Sheree Dornan: Boro(d) digital print cascade dress

It is always wonderful when art takes a broad stroke, when it transfers itself from one designation to another, one discipline to another, one world view to another. To connect art to a place that seems to others to be outside of itself, outside its natural remit, is to really understand art, to understand its central purpose in our lives.

Art is not there to be rarified, to be part of an ever accumulating collection, something to be passed on to future generations to maintain and then pass on again. Art is there to be lived, to be part of the now, it is there to be wrapped around the psyche, to be part of the everyday as much as it is of the special. Which is why art and design connections are particularly special.

Sheree Dornan: Boro(d) digital print on silk

Sheree Dornan: Boro(d) digital print on silk

From fine to design doesn't always work of course, there have been many disasters, many half attempts, many ill-considered ones as well. Often, art was stuck on top of a discipline, as if it were merely a form of signature from a particular artist, that it would somehow give cache to the discipline it was attempting to attach itself to. However, when it works well, when the connection is focused, sympathetic, and understood, then it works exceedingly well. 

The artist and designer Sheree Dornan has certainly succeeded in connecting and combining art and costume. Her beautiful works are so effortlessly interchangeable between fine art on a wall, and fine art on a body. This is no mere decoration of a garment, but is in fact an art piece draped upon a living person.

Sheree Dornan: Boro(d) digital print, detail

Sheree Dornan: Boro(d) digital print, detail

With minimal cutting and no waste Sheree is able to provide elegance and flow to her work. Garments appear to move as if the body that wears them is still part of the artwork, which in many ways they are. To wear a costume by Sheree is very much wearing a piece of artwork by Sheree, the two are connected so organically, that the space between one and the other cannot be seen.

Boro(d) is the name Sheree gives to her featured work. She cleverly uses the borrowed word  and technique of boro, and places it within the larger context of Boro(d), and although indeed borrowed, Sheree has made this technique and process her own.

Sheree Dornan: Boro(d) digital print, detail

Sheree Dornan: Boro(d) digital print, detail

Boro is derived from the Japanese term meaning something that is tattered and/or repaired. It is a word and definition that has many explanations, and many particular and conceptual meanings depending on who you are, and how you want to see it. But it is about the continuation of a piece of cloth, one that is maintained and added to over the years, allowing the integrity of the piece to remain even as it is modified and added to throughout its history, rather like maintaining a family quilt through constant repair.

Sheree produces her borrowed concept of the boro, her boro(d), using a working process that focuses on specialised digital printing techniques onto selected silk base cloths, producing limited edition runs of each print design. 

Sheree Dornan: Boro(d) hand dyed, hand stitched panel

Sheree Dornan: Boro(d) hand dyed, hand stitched panels

She uses mostly rectangular pieces that can be either made into fine art hangings, or suspended, or draped wall panels, or they can be formed into garments by draping them onto a mannequin with minimal cutting and no waste. Each garment becomes, but its very existence and making journey, an individual piece, with no other copy, no short or long runs, just the individual piece in its entirety.

Hand editing is done on each piece with embellishing techniques such as stitching and beading. The hand editing is applied to both the fine art wall panels as it is to the fine art garments, in many ways making it even more apparent that the creative techniques and process is the guiding line between fine art and costume, so that art becomes costume, and costume becomes art. 

Sheree Dornan: Boro(d) installation fashion forms exhibition

Sheree Dornan: Boro(d) mixed media on canvas

This is the defining point in Sheree's work, that combination of art and design, of wearing a garment that has been part of the process of fine art, because it is fine art. Being closely connected to an artwork is always a difficult process for many, but to be mesmerised by wearing a piece of fine art work, to be integral to the canvas, it couldn't get much better than that.

More of Sheree's work can be found at her website: www.shereedornan.com and www.blockdstudios.com.au

Sheree can also be found on social media: twitter, facebook, instagram

She is also one of 35 artists featured in the book Textile Visionaries: Innovation and Sustainability in Textile Design by Bradley Quinn

Please be aware that all of the imagery provided for this article, was indeed provided by Sheree. If you want to reproduce any of the images of her work, please ask her first. Thanks!

Sheree Dornan: Boro(d) panel detail with digital print boro patches

The Work of the Artist Dennis Potter

Illustration: Dennis Potter. Big Boro

Japan and Japanese culture has both fascinated and inspired creative individuals across the planet for generations. The defined nature of Japanese culture, both in the visual and in the conceptual, lends itself to a broad interpretation and reinterpretation by artists from a range of backgrounds and disciplines.

The artist Dennis Potter is inspired by a number of different elements of Japanese, and East Asian culture. He has travelled and lived in a number of environments through East Asia, and has been correspondingly influenced within his creative work by those environments.

Illustration: Dennis Potter. Big Boro, detail

One specifically Japanese inspired creative theme that Dennis has used in his work, is that of the kimono, more specifically the hakui, which is a kimono worn by Buddhist pilgrims who circumambulate the Japanese island of Shikoku. This specific and simple garment works as a metaphor for experience and memory, because it is inscribed with both printed seals and brush painted blessings and sutra written by monks visited by the pilgrim whilst wearing the kimono.

The kimono of the pilgrim becomes the skin of their experience whilst they are on the island. It becomes transformed by creative art, and by the experience of the pilgrimage. Therefore, walking the long treacherous path around the island, the kimono becomes worn, stained, rain washed, and faded, it becomes an artwork of experience, the experience of the pilgrimage, and in turn the experience of the pilgrim.

Illustration: Dennis Potter. Japanese Rain kimono

Dennis has taken the idea of the pilgrimage kimono and worked it creatively into his work. The kimono's that he produces are a cultural hybrid, or "quote" of the hakui, taken from the stance of a westerner with a painterly background. 

Dennis works in a range of materials and has very much based himself within the mixed media discipline. His kimono's are complex layered works that use and reuse themselves within each composition. In many respects, the artist plays with the conceptualisation of the pilgrimage, the idea that a costume can become a noted pathway of experience, that it can highlight moments and directions, pauses and changes in direction, the fundamental apparatus of all our lives, the trajectory of our experiences.

Illustration: Dennis Potter. Flax kimono

These are indeed extraordinary pieces that tell of the unique experience of the artist, but also tell us something of ourselves. Dennis kimono's show us the patchwork of our lives, the bringing together of experiences, connections, meetings, and partings, of the joy and confusion, the calmness and stress, the jumble of contradictions that is a life lived.

This article can only show a small sample of the artists kimono work, which in turn is a small sample of the artist's life work. Dennis has a wealth of creative and observational experience, and he pours that liberally into his work, hence the great range of work that he has been producing. His work can be found at his comprehensive facebook site, where he has arranged an album of his kimono compositions, as well as regular updates of his work in progress.

Illustration: Dennis Potter. Flax kimono, detail

Please be aware that the images for this article were kindly supplied by Dennis, and are therefore his property, please don't use them without prior permission from Dennis himself.