Shelley Fox. Installation, Fashion at Belsay, 2004.
Shelley Fox was one of the fashion designers invited to an exhibition at Belsay Hall, Northumbria in 2004. She took a small anteroom, typically with a 15' ceiling as Belsay Hall is an early Georgian house. It was built between 1810 and 1817, but so badly afflicted by dry rot by the 1970s that it was made structurally sound and then left as an empty shell. This is why it is used for art installations, one of which is Fashion at Belsay Hall.
Shelley Fox lined the walls of this small room – well, not so small, it looks about 10 x 10m and has both a beautiful sash window and a large fireplace – with bundles of white cloth representing the sheets, towels, dust covers, pillow cases, undergarments, shirts, night gowns and night shirts that went through the laundry of a typical country house with its small army of servants.
The appearance of bundles of white cloth is transgressive: this material in this form would never have appeared upstairs. It all had to be transformed: washed, bleached, dried, starched, ironed and folded before it could leave the nether regions for the rooms occupied by the family. We seem to have, today, more interest in the processes of running a large house, than the occupants of the houses themselves, which over the centuries have been so very well documented.
Shelley Fox was interviewed for Fashion Projects issue 3. It is an interesting interview as it is not so much about fashion, but about the processes of making things, of burning cloth, of adjusting and readjusting a garment as the body underneath it changes over time. Much of what she says is about accommodation of accident and change and the shifting of perception. It goes way beyond frocks.