Professor Andrew Groves

Felix Luke

Decoding the Details

Daylon Orr

Hazel Ryan

Radical Pedagogy, Labour and Fashion

Heated Gloves

Ali Lotz

Laura Conant

If You Wanna Go to Heaven You Have to Die

Sharif Elsabagh

Silvia Bombardini

Billy Myles-Berkouwer

The Mechanics of Shoplifting

waistcoat.png

A Blessing Veiled in the Cloud

Felix Luke; Design, Direction, Dev, Rascal

Musician captivated by chaotic, untamable sound patterns. LL’s work follows a strong desire for poetry, intrigued by its ability to open spaces where the imaginary invades the real, subtly changing our modes of expression and ways to experience the world. Through compositions made with her Buchla Music Easel (a synthesiser known for its rich organic sounds and complex design) and her field recording practice, she pays particular attention to sonic environments which are not easily accessed by humans – especially at the microscopic scale – using technology as a tool to feed the imagination with natural phenomena.

Louise Le Dou

Zach Beech is a London-based director and visual artist. His work uses a mixture of real footage, 3D animation and digital manipulation using AI. Taking inspiration from fantasy, surrealism and the gamification of everyday life, he delivers an aesthetic of stylised photorealism through the use of real-time graphics, powered by game engines.

Zach Beech

Billy is a multi-disciplinary artist and web developer. He works across painting, drawing, 3D design and coding.

Rifke Sadleir is a creative technologist, educator and sometimes illustrator. Alongside collaborator Daniel Baragwanath, she is one half of DXR Zone. Through 

Rifke Sadleir

I gently describe myself as a web developer and organiser with experience in creative technology and interactive media. I draw on a cross-disciplinary background spanning mathematics, music and humanities to inform an open, distributed and caring approach to the work I do. In recent years I have presented work and co-convened events for disparate digital arts and music projects at galleries and venues across London and Europe, as well as spending time in research and advocacy for refugee rights. At present the bread I eat is paid for in majority by University of the Arts London. I spend as much time outside as I can and in another life I hope to know a shared experience of soil and season better than silicon and city.

Andrew Groves is Professor of Fashion Design at the University of Westminster, and the director of the Westminster Menswear Archive, which he founded in 2016. It is the world’s only public menswear archive, establishing a space where students, academics, and designers in industry are co-located to conduct object-based research. It houses over 2,000 examples of some of the most significant menswear garments from the last 250 years, including designer fashion, streetwear, everyday dress, sportswear, workwear, and uniforms. In 2019, Groves co-curated Invisible Men: An Anthology from the Westminster Menswear Archive, to date, the United Kingdom’s largest menswear exhibition. He is the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Locating Menswear network.

Daylon Orr is the founder and director of Fugitive Materials. Born in Tucson, Arizona and

raised in Brooklyn, he is an archivist, publisher and rare bookseller with an interest in

progressive publishing and radical media – particularly the detritus of anti-capitalist and

Fugitive Materials is committed to the preservation of radical, lesser-known, and

alternative histories, and to the disruption of informational privilege through publishing,

bookselling, and archiving. We specialize in the material cultures of resistance: the

detritus of radical social movements, histories of labor, counterculture, pedagogy,

urbanism, uprisings and art. Our clients include libraries, universities, museums, private

clients and readers around the world. We find unusual books, periodicals and

ephemera and locate rare and out-of-print publications.

Sharif makes images with a computer. Lives in Scotland.

(B. 1994 Butler, PA, USA) Ali is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer and DJ. Previous work includes community radio DJ, gas station attendant, screen printer, Goodwill sorter, pipefitter, camera technician, farmhand, filmmaker, housekeeper, freelance photographer, GP receptionist, art teacher and illustrator. Her work in art, music and writing is often autobiographical, intertwining the culture of Western Pennsylvania (i.e. rednecks, horror films, and Christian pietist Separatist sects) and her experiences as transient worker with the worlds of her personal favourite fantasies, fandoms and desires.  She is currently based in Seoul.

George Lynch is a writer and editor. She lives and works in London. Recent publications include Fieldnotes Journal, Oxford Poetry (Partus Press), FBDN (Sticky Fingers Press) and Datableed.

George Lynch

Laura Conant is a Brussels based designer, developer and producer. Keen on creating her own tools through coding and programming, her personal practice situates itself at the crossroads between queer-feminist technologies and sound. She's part of the Brussels based music label and event series MONTAGE, as well as a member of the collective Bye Bye Binary: a research group working on gender fluid typography.

William English is a Leicester-born filmmaker, broadcaster, bookseller and co-founder with Sandra Cross of the organic vegetarian restaurant, The Dining Room (1980-1990). He is curator of the Captain Maurice Seddon (Royal Signals) archive, audio selections from which have been released as The Seddon Tapes (Paradigm Discs). English’s long running radio series Wavelength is a programme of multiple agendas showcasing under the radar experimental music, poetry and art, broadcasting on Resonance 104.4fm. His films include Ex-Library, Heated Gloves, It’s My Own Invention, and City.

William English

Silvia Bombardini is a London-based writer and occasional film curator, a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths University and an Associate Lecturer. She teaches in the Fashion and Design Product departments at the RCA, Contextual and Theoretical Studies at LCC and Fashion Journalism at LCF. Silvia’s PhD focuses on shoplifting as a feminist practice, and is part of the ERC-funded ‘Politics of Patents (POP): Re-imagining citizenship via clothing inventions 1820-2020’ research project in Goldsmiths’ Visual Sociology department. Her interests include all forms of subversive consumer behaviour – from the 1946 Nylon riots to the Black Friday hordes of today, and she has argued for a revaluation of counterfeits from postmodern and postcolonial perspectives. Silvia has written for several international magazines and websites, and used to run a monthly ‘Coming of Age’ column for Shanghai-based magazine Modern Weekly China, on how the trends followed by young people around the world come to reflect broader cultural and political shifts. As a film curator, Silvia has organised screenings in London’s theatres and galleries, volunteer-led, not-for-profit community cinemas, and worked with ASVOFF and MUBI.


DXR Zone is an art direction and development agency who design and code interactive experiences and websites.

DXR Zone

Well, hello there. It’s now been a few years since we released our last issue, and rather fittingly this issue’s theme of ‘work’ is why it’s taken us so long to get another issue out. We’ve been pretty busy. With other work, mostly. Money work. And then we tried (and failed) to get funding. Funding applications are a lot of work too, and I think we filled out about six of them before giving up entirely. We thought, in order for the work in the Issue of Work to really 

we should be able to pay everyone for their time and skill. It’s work, after all. And great work at that.

But honestly, I think it’s rather difficult to communicate what Bog is to an institution. We call ourselves a magazine but, at each turn, purposefully evade categorisation. More and more, we’re coming to think of ourselves as a formless entity that changes as the world around us does, and as we do, with a few key principles that tether the output: a love for the histories embedded in, and sociocultural meaning, of clothing; a commitment to making what might otherwise be hidden, seen; and to make all of this accessible and experiential. Each digital issue of Bog cements these principles and the other satellite projects we do around it.

So, without further ado, here is The Issue of Work. We have left the deep, warm comforts of the bog behind, and brought Bog to the streets of the city, hence the navigation for this issue is one long, neverending path – or ‘the commute’ as we like to call it.  If you’re lucky, you might even find yourself tumbling down below street level.

On this commute you will come across ‘shopfronts’, each one taking you to a project which explores some form of crossover between garment and work. Through each of the projects in this issue, we have attempted to begin interrogating what work can mean when it comes to fashion both past and present. First, we’ve looked at clothing that 

, such as in our documentation of heated clothing designed by Captain Maurice Seddon in the 1970s and 1980s (Heated Gloves) or Silvia Bombardini and Sharif Elsabagh’s reimagining of Victorian shoplifting clothing (The Mechanics of Shoplifting). Then, there’s clothes for working in – 

– whose place in today’s style lexicon has been examined by the artist Ali Lotz (If You Wanna Go to Heaven You Have to Die) and explored within our project with the Westminster Menswear Archive (Decoding the Details). Then we take a look at garment-making-as-work in a more historical context, through Daylon Orr’s essay about the education department of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in the early 20th century (Radical Pedagogy, Labour and Fashion) and an uncovering of the story of the Gairloch hose, a knitting industry developed for women in the Highlands of Scotland to make money during a time of famine in the mid-to-late 19th century (A Blessing Veiled in the Cloud).

Work itself is an unavoidable subject for us – one that plagues us each and every day we have to exchange our labour for cold, hard cash. But it feels particularly apt now, considering that ‘work’ is such a hot topic, with the precarity of work and the pay and conditions we work under being at the forefront of debate as, here in the UK, we descend into yet another economic recession. Quite accidentally, some of the projects in this issue respond directly to the issues we are facing in this crisis of work: such as the cost of heating our homes; rising food prices; a questioning of the purpose of labour unions; and anxieties around survival within a period of ecological and social disintegration. I will leave it up to you to explore the work within the issue and make these connections yourselves.

Since the 1980s, work in the creative industries has become increasingly precarious, yet the aesthetics of ‘work’ have become a prominent style within art and design, from collectives such as the figureheads of turn-of-the-millenium alt-fashion Bernadette Corporation adopting the structure of a company, to the popularity of historical workwear garments as leisure-wear. But work within contemporary art and design industries is a difficult and nebulous concept which evades a concrete definition every time I attempt to grasp at it. So what even is creative work? How might we control how we work? Or the conditions that we work under? When everyone has to be a ‘someone’ in order to succeed, the possibility of grouping together to instigate change is ruptured. In any industry built on the requirement of individualism in order to succeed, one’s identity becomes a brand to peddle, hence ‘work’ becomes ‘life’.

Unsurprisingly, we don’t have the answers to the above dilemma, but decided that we could make a good go at adding to the ongoing conversation around labour and creativity and interrogate some of the historical context. As Daylon Orr writes in his essay on the educational department of the ILGWU for this issue, “the history of past struggles and the social and cultural contexts of art, literature and fashion, are of the utmost importance in understanding and navigating areas of tension today”. Bog has always attempted to excavate the past in order to help us understand our present and our myriad possible futures. This sentiment, that knowing about the successes and failures of the past might lead us to a better future, is one that we hope this issue might imbue in you, too.

Keen-eyed boggites will notice that this issue, The Issue of Work, is a lot more slick than the previous two. We thought, well, it’s about time. When we released our first issue in 2019 we wanted to resist the polished, hyperrealism of well-executed CGI that was beginning to pervade the internet, opting in favour of the slow, the janky and the pixelated. We aren’t exactly techno-optimists (we would probably call ourselves luddites, to be honest) and so working with the web and exposing its limits – deconstructing it, if you will – whilst exploring what the internet can do in a more utopian sense (such as giving us the ability to share things with the world that might never be exposed) was an interesting challenge.

But in those four years since we launched, the capabilities of what can be done with the digital has expanded considerably. Now that there have been a good few years of development in terms of the possibilities of web design – spearheaded by people like Rifke Sadleir of DXR Zone who worked on this issue – it felt like a good time to flex what we can really do, while getting back to the meaning of the work and building a world around each project we commissioned.

Each space is complete with a soundtrack composed by Louise Le Dou, whose work bridges the field recording with analogue electronic music, dilating sounds of the everyday into rich acoustic explorations of a particular time and space. We spent a day together walking around her native city of Paris collecting some of these sounds, tuning in to the hum of metalwork, dropping microphones down cracks in the pavement, listening, carefully, to a city and its cacophony of vibrations.

Those cracks in the pavement, where the weeds thrive, is where we feel we are at with Bog. As ever, we exist for that which lies beneath despite the odds, like the soil that gathers in fissures surrounded by the concrete of city streets.

Bog is a sum of its many talented parts→

Web design, direction and development: Rifke Sadleir

Web design and development Heated Gloves and Decoding the Details: Felix Luke

Web design and development The Mechanics of Shoplifting: Billy Myles-Berkouwer

Web design and development Radical Pedagogy, Labour and Fashion: Hazel Ryan

Web design and development If You Wanna Go to Heaven You Have to Die: Laura Conant

Tightener of words and all-round legend: George Lynch

Thank you to the following for donating to our fundraiser and bringing The Issue of Work into the world <3

Aidan Duffy • Alessandro Merlo • Alex Webb • Alexandra Vincent • Alfie Sibthorpe • Alicia Gladston • Alison Ingram • Amy Drumm • Ana Larruy • Annie McKinnon • Arabella Aldrich • Arthur Carroll • Ben Clarke • Ben Ditto • Benedict Salter • Betty Ignatova • Bronte Dow • Cecile Tulkens • Claire Barrow • Clara Boulard • Colombe d'Humieres • Daniel Neofetou • Diarmuid Farrell • Ella Sweeney • Ewa Poniatowska • Finn Chesterman • Fionn Duffy • Firpal Jawanda • George Lynch • Harman Bains • Hatty Nestor • Hendrickje Schimmel • India Lovelace • Ingrid Thompson • Jen O’Farrell • Jess Canje • Jo Cook • Jody Husky • Josh Cook • Julia Lessere • Julia Svensson • Julie Phillips • Kat Heald • Laurie Barron • Louise Le Du • Madeleine Porritt • Malachy Duffy • Morag Keil • Noa Maras • Oliver Williams • Philomène Pirecki • Priyesh Patel • Rae Bergin • Rifke Sadleir • Rosie Woodhouse • RS Owen • Sarah Hartnett • Sim • Simon A. Bird • Soha Salem • Taylor Thoroski • Theo Adamson • Tom Hardwick-Allan • Valerie Kong • Wes Knowler • Zarina Bekerova 

Editor’s letter for Bog’s Issue of Work