Terese Agnew was walking through a department store one day and noticed the signs of all of the designers posted amongst the garments for sale.  Having recently met a couple of garment workers, she realized that their identity and was rarely thought of and deliberately hidden.  She became inspired to create a work of art utilizing the tags from the garments themselves.  Her work is based on a photograph taken by Charles Kernaghan of a labor worker in Bangladesh.

There was a massive campaign to aquire the labels, with thousands of people painstakingly cutting the labels from garments.  She used the labels in numerous ways to create shading, background and a border.  "I have always been fascinated with how the work of art becomes an artwork", she says.  "Twenty years ago I started out as a public sculptor.  My early work included large-scale installations that involved hundreds of people in the art making process.  Their involvement demonstrated the potential for people's labor to become a form of public communication".  In 1991 she started making art quilts in addition to sculpture. 

You can learn more about Terese's work by clicking here.