What Crazy Material Are These Dresses Made From? An Artist Challenges our Perceptions

Did you guess marble? I didn’t. I thought it was cotton—or some new chemically engineered fabric! It reminded me that “Perception is reality,” or so I have heard.

“Who made these?” You ask. Meet Alasdair Thomson and his beautifully living marble sculptures. Mimicking the flow, and breathe that an item of clothing can carry, the artist used dresses donated by his family as models to capture the vitality present while wearing a favorite blouse or frilly dress even beyond our use. His work lifts the weight of the heavy marble stone to render a visual, and emotional, experience that detracts from its physical reality. It reminds me that an artist carries the burdened task of transgressing the cliché. Clothes are an integral part of how we navigate our worlds. We wear them, not only to cover up, but also to be delicate in communicating the density our selves.

In our fast, global, contemporary lives we tend lose the artistry that goes into making a shirt, blouse, or sock. The toil on the factory floor can be the heavy weight with which our favorite frilly blouse is gifted to us.  Thomson’s work is brilliant in recapturing the burden that garments hold in our society as commodities, which eventually become landfill items, even though they may provide us with moments of delicate joy.

Want to reduce the social burden of your fashion finds? Spread the health with these tees.