Justine Woods

Project Description Can I Hug You, Mitchimakinak? Can I Hug You, Mitchimakinak? is a garment-based work informed by the early stages of (re)building a relationship with Mitchimakinak (present-day Mackinac Island, Michigan). Situated within a larger body of research exploring place-based fashion knowledges and their role in re-stitching Indigenous ontologies and bodies to place, this work considers the role of consent within relational and land-based fashion practices. As practice-based researchers, we carry a responsibility to ensure our research is ethically sound and prioritizes care for our research collaborators. But what do we do when land is our research collaborator? How do we ask for consent when exploring fashion knowledges that are deeply informed or held by the land? This is important because the care and consent of land is equivalent to the care and consent of the Indigenous body. Honoring this relationship through material intention and activated through wear, Can I Hug You, Mitchimakinak? becomes a material gesture of informed consent, one that invites land into the design process as an animate and autonomous creative collaborator. Bio Justine Woods is a garment artist, creative scholar, educator and curator whose research and creative practice explores epistemological, ontological and material complexities in expansive, loving and caring ways. Stretching across fields of study, including but not limited to, fashion studies, performance and embodiment, and research-creation, Justine's work passionately situates fashion as a pluriversal phenomenon. Originally from Tiny, Ontario, Canada, Justine lives and works in Lenapehoking (New York City) as an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Knowledges and Fashion Design in the School of Fashion at Parsons, The New School. Concurrently, she is completing a practice-based PhD in Media and Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University.