Great Depression

Raewyn Turner 2020

Assemblages

Over the past 20 years I stitched together a series of imaginary pieces as if their owners had danced until fatigued.

The materials were sourced from detritus which I found while clearing rubbish from a house I moved into in Melbourne, Australia in 1983.

It was a rare supply of disintegrated, shabby, tattered and threadbare remnants saved during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Some were carefully stored in shoeboxes which were covered and sealed shut with magazine pages glued around the lids. Inside were tiny remnants of cloth carefully rolled and bound with cotton thread, glass beads stitched onto disintegrated gossamer silk, fragments of beaded collars, perished hems and sleeve cuffs. Some of the materials were disentangled from unrecognisable clumps that had perhaps become more tangled together as the world spun on its axis for 50 years.

The Great Depression of the early 1930s was the deepest global economic crisis of the twentieth century.A slogan during that time "Use it up... Wear it out... Make it do... Or do without" by the War Advertising Council during World War II, promoted the dual need to conserve scarce resources and to help keep prices down by not generating excess demand.

“Australia has, of course, known national miseries before. Living memories of the annihilating Great Depression grow faint, but the recorded histories are indelible. So devastating was the impact of global economic events upon this country that in the early 1930s, rates of national unemployment rose to 30% of the population – a tally second only to Germany. In a country that had not yet built a welfare state, government assistance was discretionary and families were fed by charity and soup kitchens. In New South Wales, communities of homeless families sheltered in coastal caves. The experience was no less apocalyptic for being economic, not environmental.” Van Badham, The bushfire crisis has shown a way forward for Australia, Guardian Australia, Thurs 16 Jan, 2020

photos: Kedron Parker