Morag





[ongoing]
The Commute: Journeys of a Pocket Scent
dry wax cotton, paper

A commute means to travel some distance between one’s home and place of work on a regular basis. An everyday circumstance that so many of us attend daily, yet experience in multifaceted ways. The Commute: Journeys of a Pocket Scent is a public archive and scented installation series that documents the individual and collective experiences of commuting to work.

The Commute collects stories from individuals, and documents the interactions they have with their clothing, spaces, people, sights and smells while on route to work, school, home and other places of connection. The project celebrates the mundane, everyday commute whilst interrogating the socio-cultural and political structures of these daily endeavours, using clothing and scent as tools to explore these journeys.

The Commute starts with a selection of digital postcards, carefully inscribed with individual scent journeys from around the world. The physical collection includes a series of public installations, fashion artefacts and carefully designed objects that together ask important questions about how we live our everyday. How can clothes and scent build communities? What is the role of fashion and fragrance in a post-individual world? What will we wear during our future commutes? What will we smell? Or, more importantly, what smells will be lost?

This is an ongoing project by Morag Seaton in collaboration with perfumers Samyak Varia and Xinning Zhao, The Royal College of Art, ISIPCA, and IFF (International Flavours and Fragrance) Europe. Sponsored by Halley Stevensons Ltd.


03.24
12 Stories from the Worn Archive
paper
12 Stories From the Worn Archive is a publication about clothing and storytelling curated by Worn Workshop from contributions to the Worn Archive: an ongoing collection of stories about people’s relationships with their clothes.

Together, as a collection, these stories share how people’s clothes are physically, emotionally and socially experienced through everyday acts of wear, as they become worn over time.

The first publication from Worn Workshop, 12 Stories from the Worn Archive brings together biographical and conversational stories of clothing to showcase how the ordinary garments within all of our wardrobes can become repositories for extraordinary personal experiences with universal resonance.

07.23
Body Displacement
dry waxed cotton

Face Jacket, dry waxed cotton, 2023. Exhibited at the Truman Brewery, London, 13-16 July 2023. 

With special thanks to my sponsors, Decode Design and to Halley Stevensons for their generous donation of materials.





02.23
Three Leather Pockets
Abbey England Leather

Three Leather Pockets, with both discreet and indiscreet openings, are pocket artefacts carefully constructed from Abbey England leather and other offcuts from the studio. Each pocket has been interpreted from coloured chalk scribbles on a jacket toile, where a group of people were asked to ‘draw a pocket’. 

Exhibited at the Royal Leather Studio Exhibition, Battersea Hangar Space, February 2023. 



01.23
A Pocket Guide to Using Pockets
scottish linen, certified cotton, british wool

‘A Pocket Guide to Using Pockets’ is a 12-step instruction manual depicting different pocket acts and their stories. The guide includes everyday clothing rituals, pocket transactions, and other repeated dressing habits that together paint a picture of individual characters and shared material cultures. The pocket uniform is a collection of carefully constructed garments with multiple discreet and indiscreet pocket openings. The garments have been produced with Scottish linen, wools, factory rejects and other obsolescences. Each pocket ritual is accompanied with a story from a clothing archive, a space which encompasses hundreds of everyday conversations about clothes. These documented dialogues have been collected by speaking to and observing people, which are then played with and dissected to challenge preconceptions and reveal alternative perspectives of how clothes should be worn.

With thanks to Molly Davies.

© Morag Seaton
© Morag Seaton