Ellen Sampson

Fiona Johnstone

Dawn Woolley

Paula Chambers

This book explores the intersections between wearable objects and human health, with particular emphasis on how artists and designers are creatively responding to and rethinking these relations. Addressing a rich range of wearable artefacts, from mobility aids and prosthetics to clothing and accessories to digital health tracking devices, its themes include care and cure; wellness culture and the commoditization of health; and the complex interactions between (human) bodies and (non-human) objects. With a theoretical framework inspired by the work of materialist thinkers including Sherry Turkle, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, and bringing the disciplinary fields of fashion studies, art and design practice, and medical and health humanities into dialogue for the first time, this volume draws attention to the complex agencies entangled in the things we wear, and situates fashion and art in relation to broader cultural and historical contexts of health, illness and disability.

Materialist Approaches to the Intersections of Fashion, Art, Health and Medicine

Wearable Objects and Curative Things

How might artists choose to represent themselves before their own death? What visual language can possibly convey the experience of living with a stigmatic and life-threatening condition that was misunderstood and a source of hysterical fear and revulsion? How might an artist respond to the loss of a loved one under such circumstances, and how can art transform private grief into an act of political engagement? In AIDS and Representation, Fiona Johnstone argues that the epidemic necessitated a radical new approach to conceptualising and visualising the human body. In the early years of the crisis the photographic portrait emerged as the predominant response and established the normative imagery of AIDS victims' and heroes'. In response, the artists explored in this book, such as Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz and Felix Gonzalez-Torres offered a more nuanced consideration of their own condition and that of others. They rejected stereotypical direct depiction to produce imaginative self-portraits that constituted profoundly moving personal narratives and penetrating critiques into the visual politics of an epidemic.

Fiona Johnstone

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