Gisela Torres - What Lee Wore

New York-born, London-based artist Gisela Torres was co-leading a Surrealist photography workshop at Farleys House and Gallery, the former residence of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, when she decided to explore the grounds on a break between sessions. She came upon a small outbuilding and peered through the window, only to encounter an eerie scene: a storage box covered in a mountain of tissue paper, and two rails of white garment bags, lined up as if in a queue. She’d stumbled upon the clothing archive of Lee Miller, en route to archival storage. For Torres, it was a quasi-unearthly encounter, these materials charged with a strong sense of Miller’s aura. She was eventually granted further access to the collection, which she began to photograph with both polaroid and digital cameras. The resulting images have a gauzy, hallucinatory quality, the perspective shifting between close ups, the terrain narrowed to a series of lines and textures, and wider shots in which bodily forms shift and dance.

Rather than a catalogue of outfits, What Lee Wore explores clothing as a vessel for memory, and archival storage as a charged space of possibility. It questions what remains when the garment outlasts the body, and reimagines the clothing archive as a landscape of ghostly encounters and latent intimacy. With a text by Rosalind Jana.

Publisher: Chateau International
56 pp, numerous illustrations, thread-sewn softcover, English
26 x 19 cm
ISBN: 9781838045050