OBJECTS / ART

THE FULL NO BODY STORY

How do we look at/ talk about / treat the female body in our western society in general, and in the world of fashion in particular? What features do we celebrate, what shapes and behaviours do we shame, and how does this affect how we view ourselves and others? 

With these questions in mind the Minna Palmqvist studio trashed, molded, melted, squeezed and expanded the normative fashion studio mannequin bust to finally land in six (6) issues to manifest through five (5) mannequin shapes.

MEET THE CONTRIBUTORS

This project could not have been executed withouth the below contributors, coming in with their passion and crafting skills.

Thanks also to The Swedish Arts Grants Committee for the funding.

Moa Edlund is a Swedish artist and sculptor, based in Skövde. This is the person who helped take the sketches of Minna Palmqvist and make them come alive in 3D, and in scale 1:1.

First of all sculpting the shapes in clay, to thereafter cast them in papier maché, just as high quality mannequins have been made for decades.

MOA EDLUND

MIRJAM NURMINIEMI, OLIVIA BROMAN and TORA OLOFSSON

When the body casts were done, they travelled to Tapetserargruppen Svängen in Stockholm, which in 2015 was started and run by upholsterers Mirjam Nurminiemi, Olivia Broman and Tora Olofsson.

In their upholstery studio, each torso was thoroughly dressed in a thin layer of polyester padding and cotton fabric, hand stitch by hand stitch, hour after hour.

The wooden neck pieces, being the icing on the cake, are made by carpenter Johanna Metsalo.

“What happens to my eye, my brain, my designs if I change the shape of one of the core tools in the fashion designer’s studio?”
-Minna Palmqvist

NO BODY AS A TOOL

Besides being sculptures and art pieces in their own right, the No Body mannequin serves as a tool in the studio of Minna Palmqvist.

What shapes can be obtained and what clashes will occur if draping directly on the No Body mannequins, thus treating the No Body as the norm, forcing the human body of the wearer to just deal with the shape of the garment. Much as the garments on the commercial market forces us all into the same bodily norms.

Here we present some of the garments and drapings that have so far taken shape with this method.

The project No Body is a continuation of Minna Palmqvist’s design project Intimately Social, which started as her master project at Konstfack College of Art, Craft and Design in 2007.

The  project builds around the designer’s experiments and thoughts around the body ideals we have been taught to strive for, in relation to the “unwanted body”.

With No Body Pt.1, Palmqvist have chosen to focus on the tool where the work in a sewing studio starts - the tailor bust. By changing the shape of one of a fashion designer’s most basic tools, she wants to shed a light upon the absurd in the perfect surface of the fashion world.

In the long run this project aims to free herself from self-evident choices in her design process. In a series of workshops, with a starting point in the problematics around the body within the world of fashion, she has demolished, deformed and deconstructed the normative female torso.

Palmqvist is also looking back at some of her previous work in this project - Just as the video installation Intimately Social 5.10, the mannequin N° 5 ”The Collapse” has been sculpted in butter, heated, and melted into a disorted and slouched shape.

MORE ABOUT THE BACKGROUND

N° 1 ”Out of Control” borrows its plump and amorphous shape from the balloon sculpture Intimately Social 4.09. Both ”Never Ending” and ”The Impossible” emerged from dissambling existing torsos and bodies.

N° 2 ”Never Ending” consists of twelve parts, from both male and female mannequins, where the pieces can be puzzled together into various combinations, without ever getting it ”right”. This can be read as our chase for perfection is useless, but also raises the question who has the right to define what is a female or a male body.

N°4 ”The Impossible”, on the other hand, is a combination of two highly raised ideals of the female body; the skinny body of a catwalk model, and the more curvasious but still slim hourglass shape.

The combination of the two can be read as a comment on the impossible in treating the body as an object that can be re-shaped season by season, where women one month are told that a flat chest is in, and the next one be told to go for a full bust.

Torso N°3 ”Trying So Hard” is perhaps the most recognizable of all the shapes in this collection, with permanent marks from wearing too small underwear.