Conclusion

Using a modular structure appropriate to the web format, I have attempted to practice a holistic approach to studying the fabric samples. As Maynard argues, "garments are material artefacts located within histories of textile manufacture and design", and "[d]istilling meaning from dress can only happen when clothing is understood to exist within the structuring of power relations."[1]

In this case, the manufacture of the objects was as much about social structures as the function of the objects. The fabric samples were a "material link to other lives"[2], not only between Aboriginal people and other institutional inmates, but between the researcher and these people. Feeling the cloth worn by Aboriginal people linked me to them, both with a sense of shared humanity, and with a sense of complicity in the inherited social structures which continue to oppress and dispossess Indigenous peoples.

"Elsewhere in these objects lie many more stories, of innumerable workers never met, their labor hours, their lives, like so many strings attached."[3]

Footnotes

back to top