This Faulty Armour

Village is proud to present ’This Faulty Armour’ by visual artist and fashion designer Christopher Shannon. This publication and poster edition coincides with Shannon's exhibition.

’Stuff Matters, the unintended, the discarded, the seemingly irrelevant. The famed junk drawer at home full of the miscellaneous things unwanted and which time has forgotten about. Or strewn on the floor of roads leading to piers and warehouses. And what of them? Yet now, here, intentionally placed. To embellish, to layer, to mount, to collage, to build up and to collapse. As with Christopher Shannon’s fashion designs, the brilliance of ‘This Faulted Armour’ lies in their treatment and their arrangement, how the everyday becomes rich source material to play with, as matter that Shannon conjoins and converges. Playing with language and wit, ideas layer upon one another and become dreamlike musings riddled with angst and despair. Again and again with Shannon, experiments with material and language tease out old ideas and new possibilities, always coming back to the meaningless of it all. Here is no exception. Melted plastic bags, melded combs, glitter from a bygone rave. And now bottle tops, baggies, empty drug sleeves. New out of the old. With ‘This Faulty Armour’, Shannon asks: what becomes of stuff when they’re not wanted? When its use function–and therefore its use value–has been realised? Can this same logic be applied to bodies? There is a distinct feeling of Northern aesthetics, of things trying to be the best they can, yet fraying at the edges. Budgeted brilliance. A glistening jewel or a random pearl in a sea of hopelessness. A hope that it will get better when it never really does. Let’s be defiant when we have nothing else to be. Let’s want for more when we know we never can’t. Not today. This is Liverpool and this is home for Shannon. In Liverpool there is texture and irony; across ‘This Faulty Armour’ there is texture and irony. Within the social spaces and domestic interiors of Merseyside there is an internal frame of thought, a recurring pool of references that are dipped in and out of, for Shannon. A mode of being. This translates onto the surfaces of the pieces in ‘This Faulty Armour’ in their entropic elegance: the hope for order as everything else seems to be falling apart. Hanging on by a thread. I want to be whole but I’m falling apart. I want to be frank yet I don’t want to care. I want to feel but I don’t want to be touched. These are innate contradictions that are at the heart of Shannon’s textile collages. It doesn’t really matter. And in the cracks of Shannon’s suburban pavements present a possibility. Here, against the boredom, is another way of being. Whilst there is no space for nostalgia, here there is. There has to. ‘This Faulty Armour’ can be seen as a way of surviving.’

Malik Al-Mahrouky

New York

October 2023