Jessamy Shay Kilcollins (b. 1984, Maine, USA) is a textile artist, educator, and sustainable fashion designer. She uses secondhand materials and handcraft processes to interrogate the roles of consumption and consumerism in modern society. Since 2022, she has been releasing creatively mended and upcycled garments made from textiles which might otherwise end up in the global waste stream under the label AMENDED. As part of her mission to educate others about the importance of textile repair and reuse, she teaches mending in the Boston area, and has taught at the The Eliot School of Fine and Applied Arts, and the Cambridge and Somerville Public Libraries, among others. She also offers garment repair services to the general public.
Jessamy holds a BFA in Fibers and a Certificate in Fashion Design from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In January 2020, she was one of eight designers from the Northeast selected to participate in a sustainable fashion design competition called Project Upcycle, and was awarded second place for her gala look sewed from repurposed materials. She also co-owns High Energy Vintage with her partner in Somerville MA, where they live with two cats and way too many chairs in an old nut factory.
My work explores color, texture, and sustainability through upcycling and visible mending. I use almost exclusively second hand materials, and integrate traditional handcraft processes like embroidery, applique, and darning to interact thoughtfully and intentionally with the innate histories of these materials. Vintage and antique textiles like handkerchiefs and napkins are freed from the confines of the linen closet, their colors and patterns on display, and small fabric offcuts are saved from the scrap bin and kept out of the waste stream. By utilizing materials that might otherwise end up as trash, along with labor intensive handcraft techniques, my work disrupts a toxic system that espouses throwaway culture and views human labor as something to be exploited.
The human experience is intimately entangled with fabric: we show the world who we are through our clothing choices; we keep ourselves warm with quilts passed down through generations. Textiles are so ubiquitous that some become easy to overlook, like the tattered jeans living at the bottom of a drawer, long ago replaced by a brand new pair, or the cashmere sweater hanging in the back of the closet, speckled with moth holes, unwearable but seemingly too nice to simply throw away. I seek to reconnect with these forgotten textile items, contrasting themes of memory, comfort, and tradition with our current rapid pace of modern existence.
