Artwork by Molly Huxley

Molly Huxley is a Third Year Fine Art Student at the University of Leeds who turns old and unwanted clothes into thought provoking sculptures and garments. Read below how Molly's interest in reusing materials originated from and her ethical and environmental considerations when creating her pieces.

'Objects that have been discarded and left ownerless have always intrigued me. Although they are just things, I am drawn to their histories and the stories that they hold as vessels of the past. My practice is simple, I make sculptures from old and unwanted clothes. I begin by collecting them, documenting them with my camera and curating an achieve of the clothing I source. I create tapestries with these items, which become amalgamations of different people’s belongings. They are cut up by hand and pieced back together again via machine stitch as garments of clothing.

This process of collecting, destroying and then re-creating is thoughtful. I imagine not only who has owned them, and what they were used for, but where they may have been worn. I form relationships with the clothing, considering their value outside of the price paid to buy them. I consider sentimental value. I imagine my garments as a personification of what the previous owners may have been like. The sculptures made are displayed on chairs or pinned to the wall to mimic a body. Or, rather, the absence of one.

I have always been obsessed with second-hand things. Mainly the stuff found in the bric-a-brac section of charity shops or in piles of so-called junk at car boot sales. My mum is responsible for that. Charity shopping is part of our love language, many Saturdays were spent rooting in charity shops with her and my auntie. Bargain hunting and scavenging. It is also driven by my ethos on reusing things rather than letting them go to waste. I even use reclaimed paint from Seagulls paint shop meaning that my sculptures are almost entirely made out of recycled materials.

I began using unwanted belongings of my own, as well as the clothes discarded by my family that they may have outgrown. This was sheerly out of the number of things we hoarded that we no longer needed. Something most of us do. I was accumulating piles of old clothing, not as a result of the inability to get rid of them but I kept them in hope that I could do something more interesting with them. Many of the clothes were too worn to send to charity shops or sell and I couldn’t let them go to landfill. They were threadbare, covered in holes or rips. These imperfections and signs of wear are what I feel make the sculptures more intriguing.

The sculptures I make are also heavily inspired by the current zeitgeist of choosing more ethically made and environmentally conscious fashion. What if we thought of clothes in the same way we do museum artefacts? Instead of ending up in the landfill graveyard, these clothes become more. They become artworks that hold a new, elevated value. Even if it’s just to me. Now, I have become increasingly interested in items I find at car boot sales, charity shops, or on the street. Clothes that I left behind by their owner, unwanted. I imagine the multiple people that these garments have belonged to, a chain of stories to tell that are interwoven within each thread.

I hope that those viewing my art will feel a sense of the past, evoking a sense of nostalgia is a key part of that. I make garments without patterns, rather using my imagination to make clothes so they always end up slightly misshapen or imperfect. The way I piece them together is somewhat Frankenstein-like. Piecing together different histories'.

Molly Huxley, 99 Squares, 2021, 1.8m x 1.8m