In the early days of the 2020 COVID lockdowns, Leah Doeland ran out of painting supplies.
Desperate for a way to continue expressing herself creatively, the Port-Macquarie-based multidisciplinary artist found herself considering her children's empty chip packets in a different light.
"They were bright and colourful and I just thought, 'Hey, I think I can do something with these', even though they had been destined for landfill," Doeland, who also works as an art therapist, tells ABC Arts.
A few weeks and a fair bit of trial and error later, Doeland had fabricated a jacket made entirely out of discarded chip packets, using a self-drafted pattern.
Hooked on the concept of making garments using materials most would consider rubbish, Doeland started looking at what else she might be able to use around her house.
And so her Destined for Landfill – COVID Couture collection was born.
Approximately four years on, Doeland has created 12 jackets using the aforementioned chip packets, but also bread bags, used surgical face masks, rags, holey socks and more.
Some took weeks, others upwards of two months, but all of them required hundreds of hours of focus, with Doeland working on the jackets in downtime between "mum-taxiing" her teenage children around or watching TV at night.
And now her work is on display as part of the Australian Design Centre's eighth Sydney Craft Week Festival at the event's Object Space window gallery, meaning they can be seen 24/7 by anyone who passes by until November 13.
ABC Arts caught up with the self-taught maker to hear the story behind four of her favourite creations from the collection, and what she's trying to say with them.
1. The chip packet jacket
You won't see the chip-packet jacket Doeland made in early 2020 at the exhibition — the artist realised she wasn't happy enough with it, and decided to begin again.
"That first jacket was quite experimental; I didn't even know how to draft a pattern properly," Doeland explains.
"It's got open armpits and doesn't function properly, so it was more of a prototype."
In one of the brief windows between 2020 lockdowns when her local craft store was permitted to open, she bought a pattern to loosely base a second version on and resumed the slow process of collecting the materials.
"It took quite a while because my three kids are only ever allowed one packet of chips a day each."
The chip-packet jacket on display today isn't much more wearable than the prototype, despite being based on an actual pattern.
"That is one very sweaty jacket! It's like a sauna, it's unbelievable. It would work great as a raincoat on a wet day, but otherwise it is not comfortable or practical," Doeland laughs.
But creating wearable garments was never Doeland's intention. Her jackets are art — meant to be displayed and spark conversation. And even if they were comfortable enough to wear for extended periods of time, Doeland wouldn't find herself reaching for them.
"I think I do surprise people sometimes when they meet me because I am rather a conservative dresser, which doesn't necessarily compute," she laughs again.
2. The old-sock jacket
The inspiration for the sock jacket, the 12th addition to Doeland's collection, struck in her laundry room, where she says "socks always go missing, or wind up with holes in them".
She made it by painstakingly hand-sewing her family's odd and holey socks together, using a neon orange thread to make the time invested in the piece as clear as possible.
A few friends donated socks to it too, adding to the story.
"I find myself looking at it and noticing the bright yellow sock that belonged to my friend Fiona, and the flowery sock that belonged to my friend Kiata.
"So when I put it on, it feels like all my friends are hugging me … or their feet are hugging me … that's kind of gross, isn't it?" she laughs.
Not all the socks were donated willingly, however.
"I used a pair of my mum's socks without her knowing and put them in the collar," Doeland admits.
"She was a little bit miffed when she realised I'd sewn the woollen socks she'd lent my daughter into my jacket, especially because there wasn't actually anything wrong with them."
Doeland wants her sock jacket to offer a commentary on society's tendency to throw out flawed but fixable items in favour of buying new ones — but that isn't the only reason she made it.
"I think kids these days are very foot-phobic and I knew the sock jacket would ruffle my teenage kids' feathers, and sometimes I just do things to ruffle their feathers," she laughs.
"So that was really fun — and I also love that if you chuck it on the floor, it looks like a pile of socks."
3. The surgical-mask jacket
The inspiration for Doeland's surgical mask jacket — the height of COVID imagery — came from her work as an art therapist in the depths of the pandemic.
Working with many people at higher risk, fabric masks were not an option for her.
"I understood the reason for [surgical masks], but I was also looking around and thinking: there are so many face masks going to landfill," she says.
"Sometimes when I choose to craft a particular thing, like the masks, [it's because] I don't have an answer to this [problem], but maybe I can start a conversation around it."
Doeland says her daughter was "disgusted" by this piece, which was made using her family's discarded masks.
"She thought they were grubby, but I assured her I didn't go through the hospital and rummage through the COVID ward's used masks."
That said, Doeland didn't wash any of the masks before adding them to the piece — look closely and you may see remnants of makeup on the ones she and her daughter wore.
Doeland says she will feel she's done her job with this jacket if she evokes "a reaction of any sort" from the people who see it.
"If somebody loves it, brilliant. If they hate it, that's OK because I've evoked something.
"One girl told me she found looking at the face-mask jacket really healing. And I was like, 'What?!' And she said, 'I just hated wearing face masks and that period of time, but you've created something so beautiful out of them that I feel healed when I look at it.'
"That made me laugh."
4. The bread bag/tag jacket
This jacket took the longest to create out of the 12 jackets in the COVID Couture collection, which Doeland plans to expand to 24 pieces: "I feel like the world was really impacted for a good 24 months, so I feel like one jacket per month is fitting."
Doeland was inspired to make this one after repeatedly noticing plastic bread bag tags on the street.
She sewed close to 2,000 tags, collected with the help of "lots of family and friends", across two layers onto her son's old school shirt.
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"For the first layer, I drilled two holes in every single bread tag and stitched them on like buttons," Doeland explains.
"So, the entire front and back of the jacket is completely covered in bread tags, and then there's a second layer of bread tags I've joined together using jewellery links and sewn on so they sit on top of that first layer like tassels and shimmy and shake really nicely."
But that's not all — Doeland fashioned the sleeves by crocheting approximately 96 coiled bread bags together, which she taught herself to do with the help of a YouTube video.
Three-quarters of the way through her first attempt at making the bread bag/tag jacket, Doeland realised she wasn't happy with it, cut off the 1,000-odd tags she'd already sewn on and started again.
"I probably am a bit of a perfectionist," she admits.
"But if the project's not working out, rather than being unhappy with the end result, I'm much happier to start all over again."
She says she doesn't look at it as time wasted, but as "time invested".
"And honestly, I love fiddly things. Some people might look at [what it takes to make these garments] and think it's quite mundane, but for me it's calming and just lovely.
"If I couldn't do it, I think I'd go a little bit stir-crazy, because I have so many creative ideas busting to get out."
Sydney Craft Week is on until October 20.
Destined for Landfill – COVID Couture is on display at Australian Design Centre's Object Space as part of Sydney Craft Week until November 13.
Quotes lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
