WESSIELING’s work concerns the asetheticisation of the everyday through the lens of fashion. Her practice uses text and installation to create work that addresses the cultural property and soft power of fashion.
A trained cultural historian, WESSIELING studied fine art at Central Saint Martin College of Art and Design. Both academic writing and visual art practice spin off her inquiry of the (in)tangible assets of fashion, consumption, globalisation, (post)colonialism, cultural hybridity and authenticity.
That fashion is an attitude, an idea or a resource, may not necessarily hint at clothing and textile or women and bodies. Its pull-push force – how we use it to construct one’s self and yet how we are led by the industry’s beauty standard – is her starting point. The juxtaposition of its use and being used by it has subsequently threaded through her work.
Draw on her dual role as an artist and academic researcher, her artwork functions as an entity to examine a research subject. Her work strikes to question if not opens up a dialogue to the enquired topics, to permits the unseen to be seen. She uses visual art both as a recording device and a way to create a field of investigation letting the research questions unanswered yet provoking discussion of the arising issues that are central to and surrounding it.
Her academic research can be viewed at www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/our-staff/l/wessie-ling