project evaluation

When I began the unit I wanted to create a body of experimental work informed by my initial research on natural structures and growth over time. Initially I wanted to make work that would could be pushed and developed to inform my sampling onto fabrics. I hoped to work a lot with unusual fabric manipulation techniques through growing crystals into the fabric. Although this remained an element within my project when I started to gather more first-hand research on coral and barnacles some of my sampling became more about fabric making through construction than embellishment and manipulation through growth of crystals.

Whilst working on my minor project I enjoyed spending a lot of time drawing, this is something that has become quite important to my work as a way of informing my work on fabric. On refection the drawings were informative yet could stand alone as pieces of work in their own right. Perhaps this is something I could push further in the future and possibly use as a way of crating fashion illustrations for my fabric samples.

When the time to make the transition from paper to cloth came I found it very hard to get started, my initial samples were flat and lacked the qualities that my drawings had. My fabric samples began to work much better when I worked more 3 dimensionally and in some cases even dispensed with the ground I was primarily working on. This gave the fabric shapes I was making much more fluidity going some way to reference my research into natural forms.

Working on 3 different live briefs was huge step for me, and I felt that by pushing myself to do this I learnt a lot. All 3 briefs were for different contexts, these being an installation piece for a quiet room, a piece of work for a stitch exhibition and a collection for fashion fabrics.  I felt the need to enter my work for different   context as I saw this as a step towards giving my practice diversity. One of the main outcomes for me when entering the live briefs was that I had to become far better at managing my time as all three of the projects deadlines were very close together. Pushing myself to do this amount of work in such a short space of time had a positive outcome when I was shortlisted for the Luetton Poste internship after a crit with Sam Leutton.

My intentions for unit x are to continue with my experimentation on cloth and to be more ambitious in my approach. I plan to take the ideas I have begun to experiment with and put them through a process to see how many different outcome I can resolve from each technique. I propose to continue working within a fashion fabrics context but am considering whether my work could work alongside a project in the direction of body adornment and jewellery much like the work of Amy Congdon.