Chloë Hugo-Hamman is an artist and teacher who lives and works in Cape Town. She works across drawing, textiles, and sculpture. Her practice explores how systems of classification within mental health shape understandings of the body through textiles and clothing. Working with soft materials and fabric scraps, she creates tactile works that sit between garment, object, and body.
Through slow, repetitive processes of hand-stitching, layering, mending, stuffing, and containment, she investigates ideas of vulnerability, protection, discomfort, and transformation, considering the relationship between internal psychological experience and the social structures that influence it.
She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Cape Town, a Master of Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from the University of Cape Town.
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"But the bag is your body" 2017
The title of this work is “But the Bag is Your Body” and is taken from Sara Ahmed’s book Living A Feminist Life (2017). I have borrowed this concept from Ahmed, who likens the body of a womxn to a bag. She makes this comparison when discussing the effect of accumulative systemic violence on the body of womxn. She says that much like a bag that gets heavier and heavier as you add objects to it, so too does the body of womxn, get heavier and heavier as the weight of emotions wear you down and you begin to feel like you’re dragging your body around. She speaks about emotions as objects, and how these objects or emotions “shape the very surfaces of bodies.”
