This month marks a significant moment for art enthusiasts as design duo Clarke & Reilly unveil "Blue Collar", a solo exhibition hosted at SIZED Studio. Located in the heart of West Hollywood, the show invites the viewer into an evocative environment, bringing to life a profound exploration of journeyed indigo fabric transformed into 60 unique, hand-crafted 'T-shirts,' depicting America and its resilient working class.

The exhibition becomes the next chapter in a remarkable series of fabric panels that spans centuries and continents, reflecting the enduring history of indigo. The fabric walls, with their rich indigo hues, bear the imprints of a journey from Somerset, England to Northern California, mirroring the resilience of the Garment District's immigrants. Clarke & Reilly's serves a call to honor the invisible artisans who shape our world, a profound reflection on the forgotten labor that sustains our society.

We The Cool: Can you guide us through your artistic journey? How did the idea of partnering in 2005 was born?

Clarke & Reilly: When we first met we were working in different fields – Bridget in fashion, David in furniture, but we felt that we spoke the same language and really responded to the other person’s work. We really appreciated each other’s outlook and how the other saw the world, and were drawn to doing something together. We were lucky early on and had the opportunity to do an interior design project together. It was for an incredible client and there were no limits as to how creative we could be. We went into it really open-minded, and through the constant process of collaboration since then, we’ve honed our skills and practice over the years.

Working collaboratively with anyone always has its challenges, but we each have our own “piece” of the process – those two sides of our experience, our different backgrounds, somehow fit together. It’s no different to anything in life; you find yourself cycling through but you rarely meet people you’re totally in sync with – we were lucky that we did and it felt like a natural fit to work together.

WTC: Tell us more about the inspiration behind "Blue Collar". How does the show relate to the working class in America?

The inspiration for this show was very much a visceral reaction to what we looking at in the world and what was around us. There were times when we’d go for early morning, jet-lag-ridden walks around the neighborhoods of LA, at 5 am or even earlier sometimes, and we would witness the early morning workers as they started their days. Often these people seemed to be hidden away in areas that you might not usually encounter in day-to-day life, which for many of us were off the typical path, in non-descript buildings where you wouldn’t even know that there were people inside. These unseen workers were busy making things that we, as a collective, believe we need in life, but through this work, we wanted to question that perceived need and explore the distance so many of us have from working-class people.

WTC: Can you tell us more about the processes the fabric panels went through, from their origins in different parts of the world to their final form in the exhibition?

The starting point for this project was the textiles; three large panels, 80 ft long in total, made up of pieces of textiles that we’d collected over many years. They came from all over – we sourced pieces from the Black Country in England, the French countryside, and the Northeast – and they span three centuries. Many had a utilitarian or practical element to them; either they were salvaged early utilitarian material, sections of bedsheets and old sacs, peasant cuts, or farming cuts, and some with old repairs and patches. Once these had been assembled and stitched together into panels, they were dyed using indigo from India, the US, and Japan, using traditional dyeing techniques.

We had previously installed the textile ‘walls’ in their entirety as part of our last presentation, AD2021, at the Howard Hughes building in LA, but we knew they would take another iteration afterwards. After that show we took the panels and installed them outside in the Californian countryside, where they were left untended and exposed to the elements for weeks; this had a huge impact on the textiles themselves. So that was the inspiration for blue collar, for all the projects we do really; the textile, the material object. We didn’t originally set out to do this show in this exact format, but it came about through the natural evolution of the fabric, especially after it was exposed to the elements in this way.

We work with things, and it’s a thoughtful process, but we don’t set out with an idea that the textiles or objects will look a certain way, or with an idea that we want to create these shows that look a certain way. One step in the process dictates the next – and that is by design - where we get to a certain moment in the process and say, ok now what do we do with this? Time is beauty and objects wear time well. We want to keep things going and keep these objects evolving. We are primarily interested in the process, and in that process, we hope that something good comes out at the end of it. We’re okay if the process takes us in a different direction; we stay open to that.

WTC: What significance does indigo fabric hold for you?

There is so much politicization around indigo, but for us it’s the absolute beauty of it; how it fades, how it evolves, and the depth of color within it. It can be really intense. Each time you use the dye you never really get the same result, and that can be exciting. We’re drawn to the natural element of it, the essence of it – as a plant and as a part of nature.

WTC: Your work explores the invisibility of workers in the Garment District. How do you aim to bring their stories and experiences to light through your art?

For this show, we chose to create t-shirts – a symbol of the classic American working class – which we see as a metaphor for where we are as a collective today. The intention with this body of work wasn’t to literally bring the stories and experiences to life, but we want to evoke the idea and the feeling of something, the raw nuance of it.

There are 64 ‘t-shirts’ in the show, and in one way, they are representations of everything that is used and consumed by us and serve as a reminder of that. In the process of crafting them from the textile panels, they have also come to life as objects. Each has its own characteristics so that we can see them as individuals in the same way we might see people as individuals; each ‘t-shirt’ has taken on a slightly different form, with different signs of exposure, in the way that each of us is different, from a different place or of a different nationality.

It’s always been an emphasis in our work to expose what isn’t seen, what lies underneath, whether it’s the wooden frame underneath a sofa or the unseen communities creating the objects that we all consume. It’s not for us to tell the workers’ stories; that’s not a goal we would want to take on. The spaces we create are an emotional response to what we see and experience, and they serve as an invitation to the viewer. This is the basis of all our work. Once we’ve created that environment the onus is on the viewer to encounter it and respond to it in their own unique way.

WTC: Tell us more about the creative process behind crafting the 60 unique 'T-shirts’ featured in the exhibition?

As a creative duo, we worked on different elements of each show, and this part of the process was led by David, with the crafting of the shirts was very much based on the idea of the classic work t-shirt. The size and shape of the textile panels dictated where the patterns were cut rather than it being something David decided upon. He liked how that seemed to speak to humanity – the fact that you don’t get to choose the size or shape of your limbs, the color of your hair. In the same way, he didn’t really choose each shirt or pocket – but they were designed to make the best use of and to maximize the textile so that there would be as little waste as possible.

Once the first chalk form was drawn out, it became quite a natural process, a bit like a big jigsaw. It was very orderly, and not random at all. Then all the pieces were laid out in the studio over weeks and weeks – and were cut out and stitched together.

Each one of the ‘t-shirts’ is unique – the weathering of the fabric dictated their personalities, their uniqueness. It was the weathering that aged them or distressed them and gave them a rawness. There was honesty in how the patterns were laid out so that one section or element of the textile wasn’t favored over another.

WTC: What do you hope viewers will take away from experiencing "Blue Collar" at SIZED STUDIO?

Beyond the raw emotion and the beauty that we’ve already spoken to, we don’t have a particular expectation, but we hope that viewers might feel a sense of uncomfortable or awkwardness in the beauty of it.

The sound, which was created in collaboration with composer Magnus Fiennes, plays into the awkwardness too, in that it is slightly jarring and perhaps a bit intimidating. Sound was always intended to be a big part of the show and it’s why we often do sound collaborations –it makes the experience more immediate as all senses are met. David and Magnus shared many inspirational pieces of music and sound over the course of the collaboration, including junkyard percussion, colliery brass bands, Americana period musical instruments, and even some spoken word, which often mirrored where David was at in his creative process with the textiles. It’s the perfect compositional score to the work as it really draws on the sense of the industrial and the working class.

WTC: As artists, how do you see your role in shedding light on social issues like the working conditions of the garment industry workers in Los Angeles?

As a collective, we’re getting further away from the humans that make the things we use every day, with many of us no longer aware of how things are made or by whom. Collectively, there is a trend to no longer think of those people. Our work has always been about exposing the people who made the object and the hand that crafted something - whether it's a sofa frame or a group of people. In speaking to this, we used the off-cuts from the ‘t-shirts’ to make the low visibility vest that is also on show – there is a lack of visibility of the working class today, and through blue collar we hope to make them visible.

“Blue Collar”: A Conversation with Clarke & Reilly on their new show at SIZED Studio

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