Where it all began
My Friend Luna began as a study of the sky, driven by an obsession with moon and star gazing, then grew into a more focussed investigation into natural change, variation and inconsistencies. While these elements are usually undesirable as consumers often seek out perfection and consistency, this project highlights and utilises them as design features.
The transience of nature
This project inspires us to seek out change and explore the transience of the natural world around us. By taking something uncontrollable and steering it towards a desired but not entirely predictable outcome, the aim of this project is to produce textiles that both reflect natural changes and engage with them. In the modern world it is so easy for anyone to get consumed by life stresses or even everyday things. We spend so much time with our heads down worrying and working and looking at screens, so through my project I hope to encourage people to take a minute, and look up. Look up to the sky, and take a minute to notice the environment you are in and become immersed in it.
While initial work was visually inspired by the sky, the aim of my project was to design a textile that can also reflect and respond to environmental changes. This led me to design and create blinds/screens, with the intention for the textile to be exposed to natural light which will over time elicit a change in the product. The images below show paper moquettes that were part of a series exploring the idea of blinds in combination with my research, and looking at how an immediate reflection of transition could be created.
Luna emerging
Natural change
At the core of this project, is the celebration of natural change and variation and with this in mind, I set out to design a system that can manipulate a form of natural change (sun bleaching) to produce a desired pattern. In doing this, I am introducing a degree of control over something natural and uncontrollable. Such a design provides assurance that a change will occur and what that might look like, however the extent of the change, the time frame and the exact result remains unpredictable. It is through this anticipation that I hope to encourage others to seek out and relish the natural world and all it's imperfections, and nurture the relationships between us as consumers, the natural world and textiles.
In context
I explored the idea of using hospitals as a space to design for—specifically wards/facilities where long term treatments take place (such as dialysis, chemo therapy of mental health care). Designing for this space interested me for two main reasons; firstly it would be a way to introduce visual stimulation and interest to an otherwise bleak environment, where patients may be spending hours/days/weeks staring at blank walls and ceilings. Secondly, a key element of my project is transition and change, which also reflects on human life and health, and why hospitals exist. Hospital treatments can dramatically change a persons life, and effects so many of us.
The outcome of this project was a collection of scaled down woven blinds/screens, made using only silk yarns, making them mono-material, and all the colours were dyed by myself using natural dyes (click here to find out more about my practice). The piece titled Aurora's gaze comprises two pieces of textile, one of which is laser-cut, to form a mechanism that utilises sun-bleaching as part of the design and cause a change/development in the product over time.
