WHAT WAS I THINKING?
NAOMI FREARS
10 April – 2 May, 2026.
This show came out of thinking about two things: firstly, my changing relationship with clothes, my rules, my mistakes, the possibilities of potential other lives or identities that clothes can offer; and secondly, how similar I find the process of getting dressed is to that of making work.
I try on everything – clothes, ideas, images – hoping to see something surprising and/or familiar. The quest for the right outfit, or a piece of work that is good enough to leave the studio, both involve experimentation, searching, and also an unavoidable self-consciousness. This self-consciousness drives the work and me.
When I first started making images as an artist I was preoccupied with ancient Greek sculpture. I was interested in the figure as a solid form capable of projecting sensation. I didn’t think about clothing – all figures were naked, even if that wasn’t obvious in my work.
In the last few years, the edge of the figure has become more interesting to me. This edge, where the body meets the world, is clothing. I find myself preoccupied now with attempts at drawing or painting a shirt, a sleeve, or a peculiar floaty jumpsuit. In the same way that it takes me several attempts to get dressed to go out, I keep trying with these images of clothes – failing, redrawing, failing again, until I see it – something new and yet somehow known.
I am constantly taking notes, though rarely read them back. For this film however I searched through them to find the lists of outfit changes I knew were there. Alongside those outfit changes I found other things that felt connected – tiny interactions with people on trains, odd or embarrassing thoughts, and imagined film scenes. Lots of these notes emerged in Aldeburgh during residencies in which I occupied the empty spaces of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears’ house. In these borrowed spaces I came across my own voice, my inner voice – sometimes a bit obsessive, and annoying.
I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear.
Which is, of course, not strictly true. The wardrobe is full, entire outfits, some still bearing their price tags, others carrying the faint residue of possibility from a changing room mirror moment that once justified them.
Most people develop an everyday uniform: precise and coded. Not imposed, but arrived at through repetition, convenience, time, and a gradual understanding of what feels right. These are clothes with familiar shapes, fits, colours, and textures that stabilise the self. They make us feel unequivocal, recognisable, safe. They do not ask too much; they confirm rather than challenge.
And then there are the others.
Imagine it: the sounds of a party surrounding you, low light catching your figure as you lean into a fascinating New York conversation. There’s a green jacket, a fabulous slinky metallic dress (the star of the show) reflecting just enough light. Gucci heels sharpen your posture, and you’re smoking a cigarette you don’t even really want, but it feels right to hold it. You look like someone who belongs exactly there.
At home, it’s a different story. The same dress, the same body, the same face, but now, seen in profile in the mirror, with your bedroom reflected back, it’s no longer effortless chic. It feels theatrical and (gulp) faintly foolish. The metallic cloth glares harshly and the heels make your stance uncertain. The whole thing edges, quietly but unmistakably, toward something clownish.
You see, the slinky metallic dress is not part of the uniform. It does not reinforce the self so much as expose its limits; it doesn’t really know you, and you don’t quite know how to be in it.
The wardrobe, then, is less a storage space than a holding pen for alternate lives: some made up of clothes that hold you together, and others of clothes that can quietly undo you. It’s an unstable territory where every choice carries a risk: to feel entirely right, or unmistakably wrong.
John Boddy
Head of Fashion and Textiles at Falmouth University
