Courtesy of Aaron McMullin
At first glance, a piece by artist Aaron McMullin might look like just another sweatshirt. Then you notice the image sewn onto the front with long white stitches: an Indian woman, her arms adorned with colorful bangles and her shoulders draped in a floral sari. Her coarse working hands hold a large clump of raw cotton before her face, obscuring it.
“A lot of my work is not totally obvious right away,” McMullin says, “but it catches your eye, and the longer you look at it, the more information you’re absorbing.”
During her undergraduate years, at Sarah Lawrence College, McMullin spent two months in India as part of a yearlong study-abroad program, focusing on the cotton industry, specifically the issues farmers there face. McMullin learned about the high suicide rate among cotton farmers, who experience respiratory and other health problems caused by extreme heat and pesticides—often ones that are banned in the West. McMullin also learned that she played a part in this as a fast-fashion consumer. “My experience in India was life-changing,” she recalls. “I felt so welcomed by everybody I met, and then, on the other side, I had been naïvely complicit in this system my whole life.”
McMullin knew she needed to share the farmers’ stories. “I want people to know what’s going on and for them to be connected and informed as consumers,” she says. Like knowing the farmer who grew your food, McMullin wants consumers to think about where their clothes come from. “We don’t talk about who grew our clothes, and this is just as much a part of our daily experience,” she says.
Photography by Matt Marcinkowski
Aaron McMullin
After two subsequent trips to India, McMullin began sharing the farmers’ stories. During a three-week trip to the state of Maharashtra, she photographed more than 100 farmers holding cotton in front of their faces as a visual reminder of the people who grew the fibers used to make our clothing. As she was talking to them, they would often tell her: “No one knows who we are—they just use the cotton we grow.”
“When I came back, I had all of this knowledge and all of these photographs,” McMullin says. “The simplest thing for me was to print some photos and put them up on a wall and talk about them.” She then began to embroider them onto secondhand clothing, sometimes next to tags that she’d cut out and sewn onto the fronts of shirts as a way to encourage mindful consumer practices.
McMullin knows that her work will evolve as she “peels back layers” of the cotton farmers’ experiences, but she’s committed to the stories and using her art to share them. Though the work could be displayed in a gallery, she prefers that people wear it “so that it’s a walking message,” she says. “I’m an artist because I’m an activist.”
The Mentor Effect
How a local arts collective inspired McMullin to return to India.
Instrumental to McMullin’s art was a mini residency at Yeyo Arts Collective and the mentorship of its founder, Dail Chambers. “I didn't even know the purpose of the residency, but Dail is one of these people in my life that if she recommends something, I do it,” says McMullin. “The whole premise was to help artists with a project in mind see that project through. On the spot, I came up with going back to India and working with these farmers and developing this community arts project.” It was during her time with Yeyo and Chambers that McMullin began to feel more confident identifying as an artist. She also moved away from a straightforward presentation of her work—a photo in a frame—to a complex conceptual one. It was a perfect fit for Yeyo, which describes itself as “dedicated to the experience and sustainability of women and families in the arts.” Not an artist? Not a problem. Located in South City near Cherokee Street, Yeyo offers workshops in movement, such as African dance; crafts; and poetry, taught by the collective’s members, as well as by guest artists.
