Some time ago I inherited a black fox coat from my mother-in-law, and although it was lush and a prized possession for her, for me it was just a garment-of-sadness: all these tiny beings who, through no fault of their own, had been raised and killed for fashion. I loved her though, so I kept this coat for a decade in my cupboard and moved it between houses. I didn’t know what to do with it and later I found a job lot of similar coats at an auction house going for a song, so I added them to my stash. What to do with them? They once had so much social capital as status object; signifying luxury, desirability, and now they are persona-non-grata, relegated to the back of the cupboard. You could wear one, but you’d be an object of social censure, at least in Australia. Through unpiecing these garments and making them into timelines, I’m endeavouring to honour both the short lives of the beings in these garments and the women who wore them and now have passed away. The timelines curve and loop upon themselves and unexpectedly get tangled, just like ours.

The name  ‘Bien Fourre’ comes from a story told to me about a inadvertent double entrende between Montreal French and European French, where in Montreal it means ‘well-furred’ and appeared on a large billboard featuring a fur-clad woman. For European visitors , though, it meant something much more surprisingly direct for an advertisement, also starting with an ‘F”…