Fabrications

Jeremy Hutchison (b. 1979, United Kingdom) graduated with a BA first-class honours from Bristol University in 2003. He received an MFA with distinction from the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
Jeremy Hutchison’s practice uses performance to construct situations that disrupt the power relations established by global capital. In the work, crises generate uncertainty, a kind of humour – a momentary strangeness in the dominant order. Many projects hinge around the manufacture and circulation of objects as a way to critically inquire into material culture and the production of desire.
Hutchison’s practice attempts to reconfigure reality – momentarily – to propose alternatives to the naturalized logic of our time. Fabrications (2013) creates a fictional account of the history of Palestine. Invoking a blue land ravaged by colonization, the work describes a dazzling geological phenomenon: vast quarries of raw indigo.
In the work, Hutchison examines the uncertainty that pervades Palestine’s borders, topologies, and geopolitical status – the land itself becomes a vessel for the imagination. Hutchison says, ‘For centuries, Palestine was bright blue. Indigo mines ran through the earth, like open veins. Since the beginning of the Indigo Wars (1919–present), oxidization has taken place across the territory, causing a widespread bleaching of the landscape. Today, only one indigo mine remains in Palestine. It is owned by a denim factory, Al-Aqqad & Partner Fashions.’
To produce the work, Hutchison collaborated with the employees of Al-Aqqad & Partner Fashions, a denim producer based in Nablus, a city in the northern West Bank. For six months, the factory had operated under the immediate sightline of an Israeli tank – its cannon pointed directly at the factory. To understand the physiological effect of these labour conditions, the artist commissioned the factory to manufacture jeans that represented what it was like to manufacture jeans at the factory.