31/03/2026
Every person carries within them the ghost of who they were before the world intervened. Before the self was shaped by expectation, worn smooth by repetition, and handed back as character. This work begins in the space between the person you were born and the person you became. In what was kept. In what was lost. In what persists, quietly, beneath everything.
Material Anthologies, curated by , asks what happens when fashion and waste collapse into one another. When the discarded becomes archival. When a cast-off garment is returned to us not as refuse, but as testimony to the cycles of consumption, to the memory embedded in fabric, to the versions of ourselves we have quietly outgrown.
Now open for public viewing/acquisition until end June. Private walk throughs can be arranged via DM.
Michael Ludwig Studio contributes three works to this exhibition, each made by founder Michael Ludwig Hittinger and each approaching the theme of growing up from a different register.
The Shirt We Never Take Off - two second-hand shirts with a child’s layered beneath an adult’s with the words “free, play, fun” stitched into the inner collar where only you will ever read them, holds the quiet insistence that what we were is not what we lost. It is what we carry.
The Orchid Principle - constructed entirely from textile waste and embellished with black glass bugle beads and hand-embroidered sequin fringe, finds in the orchid what is rarely said plainly: that the most extraordinary growth happens not in comfort, but in difficulty.
Mental Cartography - oil on a repurposed textile ground, holds the image of a mind mid-becoming: identity unresolved, the eye and the brain dissolving into paint, the self suspended between what it was and what it is being asked to be.
Waste, here, is not an ending. It is a beginning.
