MORE ABOUT MY THESIS

From the Diesel and Dust is a collection I created for my MassArt Fashion Design Undergraduate thesis. It shows my artistic realization of humanity's potential if we united and put a stop to our extremely destructive tendencies. It is an incredibly idealist and optimistic concept considering the vast scope of problems that plague our world and some might even dismiss it for this offhand, but it was important to me to create this collection as a reminder that no matter how bleak things may get, we should still always look for and strive for the best.

This collection took major inspiration from the acclaimed album Diesel and Dust by the band Midnight Oil, an album that acted and still acts as a call to action for racial justice, environmental protections, and systemic reform in Australia and New Zealand (actions clearly needed in the United States and around the globe as well). I listened to this album over and over again — practically lived and breathed this album — and used everything it made me feel in the creation of my collection. Asymmetrical elements on symmetrical silhouettes represent the endless movement and edge that is the driving force behind the musical structure of Beds are Burning. The naturalistic color palette shown across a combination of new and recycled fabrics wholly embodies the lyrics stressed in Warakurna. And cut outs and inset panels break up my pieces visually manifesting the uneasy political and industrial relationships stressed in Sell my Soul

While working on this collection one verse I kept returning to was the opening verse to the album. "Out where the river broke / the bloodwood and the desert oak / Holden wrecks and boiling diesels / steam at forty-five degrees." At first I was returning to it quite literally as whenever I finished listening to the album if would then loop back to the beginning before I could stop it — because of this, it is definitively my most listened to section of the work. But as this kept happening I came to realize just how well it set the stage for the entirety of what was to come. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I see it as a moment of vivid storytelling and it influenced my visuals immensely. After I noticed this, I got the idea to embrace it further. In designing my collection to that point, I felt I had already coincidentally represented every one of those opening lines visually with the exception of "Holden wrecks and boiling diesels," and looking into this lyric ended up changing the direction of the entire collection.

Holden was a subsidiary of General Motors in Australia for a very long time — in fact, only made redundant in 2020, after my collection walked the runway. So Holden wrecks are ultimately just car wrecks left to waste away in the sun and in time. At least in my experience, seeing long-abandoned car wrecks is uniquely melancholy. They are a both an acknowledgement of a human existence separate from my own and a very forceful realization that something bad probably happened to that person. When I see an old car wreck I am often left wondering what happened for this person to choose to abandon their vehicle — something that is often the lifeblood of a working-class family — and I eventually stray into pondering how the immediate destruction followed by slow decay of this hulking machine can be so beautiful. I chose to bring the unique melancholy and beauty of Holden wrecks into my collection quite literally, through pieces of wreckage I found at scrap yards and along the roadside, but I did this not just for the opening lyric but rather because of how I thought I could integrate this as a concept with The Dead Heart.

The Dead Heart is an incredibly powerful song for a plethora of reasons. It ultimately talks on the history of indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand, a history written in so much blood, so much mistreatment and wrongdoings. The lyrics are heartbreaking expressing a never-ending cycle of resistance and diminishing returns for the efforts put into resisting. It is a song that never fails to send a chill up my spine when I hear it. And yet there is also something hopeful about it — and not just in the chord structure, but in the resistance itself because there are returns. While referencing the cycle, it recognizes that things may never be as they were again — we can't take back the history of our world — but there can be a future where that history is rightfully and respectfully acknowledged and the good things we have are cherished and returned to their rightful places, and that future is now. While the landmark itself remains a UNESCO World Heritage site and will never be treated exactly as it was before, The Dead Heart itself was recorded for the handing back of Uluru to the Pitjantjatjara, an astoundingly important and progressive act. That act remembered and appreciated worldwide through this song, sets a beautiful example of how things can be.

I brought Holden wrecks into my collection as a way to represent the wreckage of our destructive global history. I wanted to show that the past is full of terrors and those terrors will in part be with us forever, but there is still a way forward. We may not be able to restore everything to what it was — in a lot of ways we may even sometimes be numb to this loss and our attempts to regain it and the wreckage we're carrying with us — but we can create a new tomorrow. The act of picking up these Holden wrecks and integrating them into my pieces is my Dead Heart and the heart of this collection.

From the Diesel and Dust is a collection that envisions human potential. It is idealistic and optimistic and yet it's conscious of the shortcomings of idealism. It knows we can only do so much as people yet still dares ask us to strive for the best. While there were challenges I faced when creating this collection and there are things I would absolutely change given the chance, I'm incredibly proud of what I was able to create and everything this collection means to me, and I hope even in a vacuum my work evokes strong feelings and speaks for itself. While we will always carry the Holden wrecks of the past with us, there is also always hope for the future.