Life Imitates Art: Mother of Pearl Collaborates with Fred Tomaselli

Life Imitates Art: Mother of Pearl Collaborates with Fred Tomaselli

“I’m a collagist,” says Brooklyn–based artist Fred Tomaselli, whose elaborate, unorthodox paintings make use of pharmaceutical pills, resin, and wood to depict scenes from the natural world. “The core of my work is in repurposing other people’s creative objects into my own,” he says. So in what could only be described as creative role reversal, this time Tomaselli’s work has been reimagined by Mother of Pearl’s creative director Maia Norman (who has previously partnered with artists Mat Collishaw and Keith Tyson) onto a canvas of voluminous wide-leg pants, calf-length skirts, and even high-top sneakers for fall.

Here, Tomaselli’s birds swoop down the legs of track pants, insects flutter across floor-sweeping dresses, and tree branches drooping with pills decorate necklines. “There’s amazing detail in Fred’s work,” says Norman, who took his conceptual creations and translated them onto silk, leather, and cotton, adding additional embroidery and embellishment. “It wasn’t a direction I initially thought my work would go in,” Tomaselli says. “But it’s a way of democratizing it and taking it into another context. Now, we’re bringing it onto the streets.”

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