Deconstructed Military Hats

I wanted to deconstruct these hats for two reasons, firstly to explore the object and secondly to explore the notion of fragmentation that Libeskind does in the building that forms the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester. I unstitched the hat by hand, a process that takes hours. These calculated massacres emphasise many meanings - physical and psychological breakdown, destruction of the world through war, a simplification of form, masking the familiarities of war and the fragmentation of our post-memories of the war-time experience. The pieces are suspended from tension wires, as lives in the balance. The forlorn fragments are interlaced with surgical thread to indicate a kind of incomplete healing and also the notion of communication - perhaps signifying the impossible of complete-ness after war.