(A Garment of) Heavy Water

The air thickens an hour before the rain comes.

This begins a new series drawn from The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter's book of rewritten fairy tales, and it keeps that weather: damp, mineral, close.

Bitter green artichoke and cool orris root meet seaweed lifted straight out of cold water, salted and faintly leathery. Carrot seed and cypriol pull it earthy and dark. It drips like a stalactite, slow and cold, with musk holding everything against warm skin.

Clara Weale describes wearing it as languishing in a rock pool. It changes by wearer, leaning floral on some, green or leathery on others. On paper it reads as something else entirely.

Clara Weale makes Early Modern by hand in Glasgow, Scotland, in batches small enough to count. The approach is playful.

The work is openly concerned with materiality. Materials are named for what they physically are rather than dressed up, and each release keeps paring itself back toward its most gestural form.

What she is after is recognition without a source, the sense of having smelled something before without being able to say where.