Masters Project: Ross Weymouth and John Claringbold
Our Executive Director Aanya Whitehead visited artist Kerri Weymouth in Coleambally on 2nd June 2020. Kerri is collaborating with Tom McEvoy on a project based on her two Uncles, award-winning fashion designers Ross Weymouth and John Claringbold.
Kerri worked with them in her formative artistic years and was intimately involved with their fashion journey. She has inherited practice, skill and knowledge on how all their designs were scrupulously made down to the last stitch. She helped make many of their dresses, and has in-depth knowledge how they were embroidered, decorated, cut and sewn. Kerri has inherited a collection of original dresses as well as all their fabric remnants, beads, laces, design drawings, photographs, memorabilia, notebooks, clippings and correspondence.
Tom McEvoy is doing a Masters at RMIT that is exploring fashion on material cultural research. He has chose Kerri’s Uncles, who worked out of Melbourne in their heyday years and were recognised as being among some of the most innovative Australian designers of their day.
The Griffith Regional Art Gallery holds a large collection of the late designers’ work.
Kerri and Tom are discussing a future project where details are not able to be revealed at this stage. However, WRA was privileged to be able to take a sneak peek into their world and we were allowed to take some photographs to share about this exciting project-in-development that will no doubt resonate largely with Griffith and surrounds once it is officially launched.
Says Tom: ‘It’s all about returning the creator’s voice to the objects they create, or bringing the artists voices to the objects they created, so people from my generation and youth, we can get a sense of the artist’s agenda and their story through these objects’. He goes on to say that, ‘we don’t want it to be wasting away in archives and losing their connection to their true meaning’ and further explains that he is ‘exploring fashion through the lens of material cultural research, looking at the meaning of objects and the meaning of things’. Tom said he is, ‘up here with Kerri looking to explore the stories behind these artefacts and photographs and seeing how much ‘Johnness’ and Rossness’ we can get out of these otherwise static objects and memorabilia.’
We will be checking in from time to time on this amazing project as it develops.
Images and story by Aanya Whitehead 2nd June 2020.
