Don't forget! Interesting stuff happening on a specific date on the calendar below this is just filler text to get the idea across.
With so many people in need of clothing that can cater to different levels of physical abilities, why does this segment of the market continue to be largely ignored by the fashion industry? What if our clothes could do more for us and for our bodies?
The Fashions and Embodiment Workshop invites participants to explore the relationship between fashion and movement through the acts of wearing and repairing. Using existing garments, the workshop will activate the tacit knowledge we each employ in the daily act of dressing and tending to our clothes. This practice-led approach aims to draw attention to the very complex reality of fashion production.
In spite of all of the technological and mechanical developments in digital pattern cutting, weaving, and printing, the manufacturing of clothes is still an industry much dependent on the hands of the makers. For them, the shortening of seasons is a hard task to follow.
The artistic research Purity or Promiscuity? Exploring Hair as a Raw Material in Jewellery and Art, explores the potential of hair to produce contradictory meanings when used as the main material in jewellery and art. Many of the creative works developed show the ambiguities and the contradictions present in hair as well as in life. With the research, my aim was also to try to answer some of the questions that arose through my practice, such as:
My doctoral research examined the embodied experience of wearing shoes and how the effects of wearing upon the shoe, the marks of use and wear, come to embody experience. Rather than drawing on a social science methodology, a historical/humanities methodology, or archival or image based research, the research utilized processes of wearing, performance and photography to examine attachment to and with our clothes.
During my mother's childhood, it was common to have a small, special wardrobe of Sunday clothes (Pyhävaatteita in Finnish). Gradually, after wearing them out, Sunday clothes became ordinary, everyday clothes. This process through which garments go from being sacred to mundane beautifully represents the long lifecycle of garments. Nowadays we don’t wear Sunday clothes anymore; however, we should still try to see that same practical dignity in all of our garments.
From years of personal observation, I discovered that art made by children is often valued by families and preserved for the future. Applying this observation to the design practice, I figured that using such artworks for clothing design could add value to garments.
I am a sculptor who uses a range of processes: glassblowing, printing, casting, welding, and sewing among others. In each of these practices, my body is my most valuable tool — it is the way I make, the way I see, the way I interact with the world. My body can do anything I ask it to do — I am proud of my body. But a dress form is no ordinary tool: to turn the malleable female form into a rigid object would transform it into a sculpture — and quite a classical sculpture at that.
