The Cross Body Bag Theory Of…
In Process, Not in Resolution
This project explores the bag as both an object and a system - a physical manifestation of post-graduate life, mapped through the hands, materials, and economies that bring it into being. Each bag is built from a shared design, a uniform blueprint. Yet, the environments, labour structures, materials, and ethical frameworks that produce them vary widely.
The collection becomes a tactile cartography of micro-economies: informal, DIY, institutional, precarious, collective, alienated. These conditions don’t just leave traces - they manifest as material differences, visible or latent, that speak to the invisible narratives of production.
Referencing Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, this project resists resolution or hierarchy. Instead, it proposes the bag as a speculative tool: a carrier of process, story, friction, and difference. Not a hero-object, but a companion in navigating a post-grad reality shaped by intersecting economies and shifting modes of making.