The piece is based on the idea of a “Warrior Shirt” or war shirt, a garment worn for protection from the elements. This garment, with origins in Ghana, which has become a dumping ground of discarded clothing, is a representation of a sea of textiles, overwhelming the population, a cloak to inspire some thought about the worldwide landfill problem. Images of mountains of garments in landfills making their way to the coastlines of countries receiving these throwaways couldn’t escape me, and I felt that creating something that somehow reflected that was what I wanted to do. 

Derived from donated jeans, the piece was created by using the pant legs of the jeans to create a piece of cloth that could be made into a new garment. The process began with the ripping of the pant legs to establish a grainline for consistency of the panels, laying out the panels to create a gradation of shades of blue from dark to light, to represent movement. The panels were then hand-stitched together to create a piece of cloth to the dimensions needed to create the garment in the scale desired. The panels were attached with the frayed edges on the outside, so that the interior of the “shirt” would be clean. The raw edges were frayed more to represent the waves of the ocean. 

The hand-cut hands, made from the one pair of jeans in natural denim, were hand-appliquéd onto the surface of the panels, at the seams, to represent humans drowning in the overwhelming amount of textiles, mountains of throwaways, continuously growing and creating hazardous conditions for the planet and its inhabitants of the planet. 

The sides of the garment were left open with ties attached, giving the option of hanging the piece to be displayed or worn as an outerwear garment by tying the attached ties together.