After her father passed away, Katrina Perdue began patching a pair of his old jeans, the last pair he’d worn. Though she had knit and sewn a bit before, this was her first time mending a piece of clothing, but the act of repairing loved and worn clothes was therapeutic in itself. “It’s kinda slowing down and having something that’s calm and meditative to do in a busy world,” she says. “I found that it was a very healing process and it really helped me through that grief.”
So, after that first pair of jeans, Perdue turned to mending as often as she could, wanting to bring new life to the materials around her — from her childhood blankie to her daughter’s stuffed bunny to a chair from her partner’s studio. Before long, Perdue broadened her scope beyond the personal. In her exhibit at Crosstown Arts, Perdue has gathered some of these items that she’s mended — some personal, like her blankie, and some not so personal, like a mended plastic bucket found among curb-side trash.
“Part of it is really studying the way something’s made and thinking about how, even though there are these huge factories and these machines, it still requires a human hand to piece those things together, and we are so removed from it,” Perdue says. “In the last 20 years, fast fashion has become a thing and we are now seeing the result of that in how much waste there is — these literal mountains of waste landfills.”
With this in mind, the act of mending, for Perdue, is more than just extending the life of an object; it’s honoring it, too, by not treating it simply as disposable among our material and consumerist abundance. Perdue even uses bright, colorful stitching to highlight this idea. “It brings attention to the wear instead of trying to hide it,” she says. “That’s a metaphor for life, thinking about sharing our struggles, sharing things that are difficult — you know, our scars that are a part of our story.”
“Mending in a State of Abundance,” Crosstown Arts Galleries, on display through March 5.
