Jacky Puzey

Postcolonial Dreamcoats seeks to explore the idea of cultural mythmaking, represented both through actual costume and the souvenirs I had collected, both objects and stories, from all the traveling I did with my family as a child and later, from Europe to Panama, USA to Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Kenya. The ‘Postcolonial Dreamcoats’ encompass a layering of history and experience within their tailoring and detail. They start from the subversion of ceremonial robes, embroidered not only with symbols of power and wealth but with cycles of complicity and exchange, interwoven histories that ignite into contested histories through economic power and disempowerment. They also come with their own carpet of trade goods, an Axminster made of trade goods, chocolate and coffee, of harsh economic realities and stolen diamonds. Their costumes at first glance seem to contain many recognizably iconic images of colonial and tourist experiences of Africa, yet these are interwoven with traditional African textile techniques, English textiles and several nods to Victorian tailoring, and embroidered with stories, souvenirs and postcard images of personal experiences. In a sense they are fake national costumes for a preconceived historical, part British Empire, perhaps African, ceremony that draws on existing historical situations  to explore actual experience, memory and situational politics.

I deliberately set out to try and make these costumes so that they were more like carnival representations of nationalistic costumes, self aware and always questioning.  While they are positioned in similar stances to many images of say, ‘the British governor and his lady wife greeting the local people’, their costumes are already embroidered with their preconceptions, the explorer’s vision of the empty African plains on the mans suit or the bright brash tourist images of flamingos on the lady’s sarong; but then these are also deliberately juxtaposed with references to the vitality possible within trading and cultural relationships, so that for example the sarong might have Katharine Hepburn in ‘The African Queen’ on it, but also has a contemporary image from a memory of a black Kenyan businesswoman I met in Mombassa who ran a large and successful fabric business between Germany and Kenya. The spats on the male costume drawing are just as much a reference to the sharp dressed black culture in Harlem, New York in the 1920s and 30’s as to the inherent unsuitability of much white British Victorian era garb for tropical climes. The combination of spats and pith helmet also becomes an example of dressing up to pass, by adopting either the smartest styles or the most practical to adapt into, or stand out in, another location and culture. I am interested both in the whole idea of clothing as signifier of authenticity of tradition, for example within traditional historically orientated displays, and clothing as the ultimate personal statement of history and experience, such as in elaborate carnival and masquerade costumes.

The costumes also contain a soundtrack of memories, songs, histories and discussions, which murmurs quietly inside them as if they would tell another story to the audience, reading themselves and responding to old memories and different ideas.