Clive Rundle About Memory

Research in fashion has received increased attention in recent years from a number of academic fields, as a site of social study as both visual and material culture. In fulfilling a practical component required in the Masters in Fine Arts at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, Erica de Greef has interrogated the multiple sites of fashion and layers of meaning that surface in the work of fashion designer Clive Rundle; considered one of South Africa’s leading creatives. This exhibition aimed to map, witness, reflect, record and note traces of the past as a palimpsest of meaning and memory in the various sites of fashion, through an investigation of Rundle’s fashion collections and complex creative processes. Notions of remembering and remembrance form networks of social cohesion in a collective, new South Africa, where histories are rewritten and change, instability and transformation inform the everyday. Memory surfaces as the abstract, fluid and personal in the context of Rundle’s fashion signs, which negotiate absence, loss and chaos, and inevitably change. The collective components in this exhibition investigate these spaces.