Olly’s fabrics and some traces of the warp in the weaving of the world

Abstract

Stuart Hall’s idea of “cultural maps” assumes that we inhabit a culture within which we share some amount of information and knowledge, even though belonging to communities and groups is complex and multifaceted. Certain cultural maps involving judgments about practices and products confer and/or deny value to producers, consumers, and owners. Olly’s production offers us a cultural map of the networks that constituted values related to clothing, design, and art in the early second half of the 20th century. In this sense, I take a contextual approach, seeking to understand the symbolic and cultural meanings of the fabrics and clothes produced by the artist, based mainly on the documentation she accumulated and I organized between 2013 and 2018. To this end, the production of fabrics and clothes is not taken as separate from the forms of apprehension and places of consumption.