EIU Tarble Arts Center

Memory Circle: A Mending Workshop w/ Hadley Clark

Wednesday, October 16, 2024 

5-7pm 

Free and open to the public; RSVP required

Through guiding many years of mending and sewing courses, artist Hadley Clark has come to believe that these circles are first a space to remember. We have been led into forced forgetting to allow us to keep mindlessly consuming. So, while you may have never held a sewing needle in your hand, Clark believes there is a piece of you that knows how to work with this tool to create acts of care and would like to sit next to you to remember. The Tarble and Hadley Clark invite you to come and sit on the floor, bring something soft in need of repair, and stitch in a circle together.  

While this is a mending workshop that will include technical hand sewing demonstrations it will also be a time to intimately connect with our garments and each other through the act of stitching.  

Hadley Clark gives presence to absence; gives new purpose to old discards; and gives form to thought. With an education in Painting (BFA, University of Kansas, 2001) as well as in Garment Design and Construction (BFA in Fashion Design with Honors, The New School | Parsons Paris, 2010), Clark’s work exists in the middle distance between art and fashion. Eschewing some of the commercial strictures of the fashion industry—seasonal collections, exported labor, textile waste—Clark’s methods more closely resemble those of an artist. Working patiently, often alone, Clark designs and constructs her garments according to deadlines set by the work itself. Part painter, part fashion designer, and part sculptor, Clark’s garments have employed materials as varied as silk, cotton, wool, soiled natural fibers, beeswax, salt, hair, and medical gauze. This material awareness, and a resulting interest in empowering individuals to fix and tailor garments as opposed to discarding them, led Clark to found her own sewing school in 2017, which she operates out of her studio.