Every day we get dressed.

Choosing which clothes to wear can be emotionally powerful. It can be liberating, freeing, connecting and inspiring. Throughout my career, I’ve photographed many people who use clothing to express who they are with via a richness of individual approaches.

While I attribute so much joy to fashion and clothing, it is also responsible for the exploitation of people and is one of the largest contributing factors to worldwide pollution and waste.

Why?

The conversation at present is centred around fast fashion, with the responsibility sitting with large companies to produce less. While I wholeheartedly agree with this, I also think there is another important viewpoint - one that begins not with industry, but with us.

Do you have a good relationship with clothes?

Our relationship with clothes is individual, nuanced, complex, and complicated. Even if you love getting dressed, and feel clothing has a positive impact on you as a person - the clothes we choose can change how we see ourselves and our bodies. They represent who we are and allow for responses from and connections with others.

Our Relationship With Clothes is my ongoing art practice exploring that tension - through the lens of soft activism. The belief that small, considered shifts in how we relate to what we wear can be a genuine and underestimated driver of change. Not through guilt. Through reflection.

Each project begins with a question. It becomes an object, an image, an installation, an exhibition. It closes. The questions accumulate. The work continues.

- Liz Sunshine