My Careworker's Uniform - Re-branded (2020—)

By

Deborah Nash

During lockdown I trained to be a careworker on the reablement programme in the London borough of Waltham Forest.

The role was to visit those who had recently come out of hospital - generally the elderly - and to administer medication, personal care, prepare meals and any light domestic chores. The job, which I did for about five months before moving out of London, gave me great insight into the now very visible social care sector. I could tell before crossing the threshold whether someone was looking out for the person I was about to visit or not. I also got to see the lamentable treatment of careworkers. My conclusion is that perhaps there ought to be national conscription for carework, that everyone who is safe and sane would benefit from a week spent doing it to better appreciate that this is all our futures.

When I left I decided to rebrand my uniform by turning it inside out and working within the seams - the borders - of the garment, using the signs and symbols of the time - two metre arrows, red crosses (kisses? place-markers?) smiling eyes, bubbled mouths and thumb prints. I introduced rough stitching almost as an infection but also as a healing suture. This article of clothing that I had worn while washing other bodies, became a body itself, bearing the names of some of those women (two were sisters). The finished piece meant many things: a record of a time, a memorial, a magic robe. When it was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2021, I contacted everyone named on the tunic. The two sisters had both died, but one husband and their daughter came to see it.

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Featured

Deborah Nash

The clothes we wear replicate a body shape and envelope a memory, of a time or occasion we wore them. In children’s stories, garments are invested with special powers, and although today’s real-life equivalents sparkle less, they are no less protective: the face mask, surgical gloves and apron; the PPE synonymous with 2020/21, when our mouths disappeared behind a fabric wrapper and the sight of a care worker’s apron became a badge of honour.

During lockdown, Deborah Nash used kitchen materials - plain flour and water - to mix paste and draw on old shirts, upcycling them into artwork diaries, annotated with the catch-phrases of the terrible twins, Brexit and Covid, yoking political jargon with autobiography. Words written in shapes within the boundaries of the body express the limits of language and the narrowness of present-day circumstance, while a uniform is close to body and heart, vulnerable and fallible, symptomatic of a fragmented world.

https://www.whatmoreproductions.co.uk