Cecile Clayton-Gouthro
information
G111 Exhibitions
Art Rental Service
School of Art
University of Manitoba

Link to first
Clayton-Gouthro page


Link to more photographs
of Clayton-Gouthro's work
Cecile Clayton Gouthro
Cecile Clayton-Gouthro performance work


ABOVE: A scene from Cecile Clayton Gouthro's work Connecting at an Unknown Rate at Gallery One One.

FROM AN ARTIST'S STATEMENT BY CECILE CLAYTON-GOUTHRO:

Like a lover's touch, clothing connects most intimately with the wearer, caressing or constricting with each movement, and like a lover's memory, clothing retains evocative sensations long after the lover has left. What remains within the empty shell, the constricting fabric, the colours and conforming seams, is the essence of the person who wore them. Clothing is the language for each individual's performance piece; we dress to conform, to call out for attention, to protect our fragility, to parade our status, to show who we think we are and to hide who we don't want to be.

The language of clothing is culture-specific. In the Western world it has developed through the fashion system, tracing hundreds of years of change and integration that reflect a wide range of socioeconomic and cultural events. To the trained eye, that history is easily recognizable within current styles, for fashion is full of recycling: it hauls around past elements like necessary baggage. These elements hold keys to the language of clothing, they retain past meaning and present them in new interpretations. Take shoulder pads for example: they were a product of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, when evidence of a man's status became sober and the sober-coloured suit became representative of the new power individual, the business man. Whereas previously, somber colours and minimally-adorned clothing had depicted men of lesser status, as opposed to the more colourful and lavish court dress, now the power shifts in society promoted the no-nonsense and efficient aspects of less ostentatious dressing. In place of adornment, impressive structure paralleled the imposing architecture of the day. Shoulder pads became the foundation for a new shape - massive shoulders which could handle the weighty affairs of power. They remained in the domain of men's wear only. Woman did not need them.

One hundred years later the situation had changed. The Western world had hardly recovered from losing so many young men in the first World War when a second devastating, man-hungry conflict occurred. Woman were needed to carry on men's work on the home front and fashion did its own part by giving women big shoulders - incorporating shoulder pads into everything from coats to dressing gowns. That fashion expired shortly after the war. It did not begin again until the 1980s' "Maggie Thatcher/iron woman women in the boardroom era" - once again paralleling the adoption of hitherto men's roles that had initiated their original appropriation in the forties.


Gallery One One One, School of Art, Main Floor, FitzGerald Building, University of Manitoba Fort Garry campus, Winnipeg, MB, CANADA R3T 2N2 TEL:204 474-9322 FAX:474-7605

For information please contact Robert Epp eppr@ms.umanitoba.ca