Laoise

My final line up. I made a collage of them on Pinterest to give a slightly cleaner presentation.

Our second brief is a follow on from the first. We were asked to choose two dressmaking/sewing techniques and develop a swatch book using those techniques.

Colour Board

These are the final mood and colour boards based on the work of Do ho Suh.

These are some pages from my sketchbook. I was drawing from his work and trying to create some of my own based on his. I was trying to curate a sort general vibe. I plan on drawing from these pages for my mood and colour board.

I spent time researching Do ho Suh, and I discovered a few things about him and his work process that interested me.

First the fact that he was born to a well known artist Se-ok Suh, an ink painter and Min-za Chung who is one of the founders of Arumjigi Culture Keepers Foundation. I can really see both the cultural and artistic influence of his parents in his work.

Do ho Suh has a strong architectural focus in his work, and the Korean house (hanok) reappears in his work time and again. Home and the memories associated with it is a strong concept for him. ‘Home started to exist for me, when I no longer had it’ Suh said in an interview.

In one of his projects, Seoul Home/L.A Home which focuses on his sense of displacement. It was sewn together from custom made fabric. The colour interested me. It’s a beautiful translucent jade colour. He picked the colour from the ceiling paper in the traditional Korean house. In the traditional house, you hang white papers on the wall and on the ceiling you have this sky blue or jade coloured wallpaper. It symbolises the sky or the universe. That house is for the scholar, so when they study in that room the colour allows them to think about the universe or a bigger a space.

The artist I chose to research for this project is Do Ho Suh.

I chose him because the colours in his work really appealed to me. I love the transparent fabrics and how they changed their nature and blended their colours when viewed from different angles.

Do ho Suh was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1962. He works primarily in sculpture, installation and drawing. He is well known for his recreation of architectural works in fabric and stainless steel.

The focus of his work are the memories that places can hold as we live in them and how they can stay with us long after we have left.

He has taken rubbings of entire apartments, covering every surface with paper and painstakingly committing the whole place to paper and crayon.

What particularly appeals to me about his work os his use of colour, as I said it was the very first thing that jumped out at me. The shades an translucency of the fabrics in his structures are magical, particularly where they are layered over each other. I also like the sort of juxtaposition of the delicate falling, draping fabrics over the sharp geometric lines of the steel structure they hang from.

Our brief for fashion and textiles was too pick one artist from a list supplied to us. We then had to research that artist, learn something about their process, materials, their origin and the meaning behind their work.

We then had to gather images relating to our artist and to their work and create a mood and colour board using 3-6 images for each.

I am particularly interested in Iris Van Herpen’s work. Not necessarily for how it looks, in fact I don’t always like her designs, but for her innovative use of materials.

She was a designer who was constantly in the back of my mind during the weeks of fashion workshops.

Van Herpen has blended materials such as steel, silk, iron filings, resin, motorcycle chain and countless other things to make her fabrics.

I particularly like when she meshes something incredibly fine and delicate, like silk, with something hard, sharp and unyielding, like steel.

She did this for Dove Cameron’s 2022 Met Gala look. Cameron wore a mesh dress with silk-covered steel pieces with create an almost freestanding, yet extremely delicate form.

The finished product.

While I’m aware that the aim of the workshop was not to create a finished wearable piece, I’m glad to have something definite to show at the end of this week.

I enjoyed messing around with the textiles, experience and finding out what worked together and what didn’t.

The metal embellishments are important to me because they bring back that element of hard restriction, discomfort and the feeling of being bound in by clothing.