Chelsea staff, students and graduates will be returning to Milan Design Week this year as part of a three college showcase alongside Camberwell and Wimbledon. The stand at Ventura Lambrate, which is coordinated by the Enterprise Collective, aims to give visitors a taste of the depth and breadth of talent emerging from the colleges.
Chelsea will be represented by graduates from BA Textile Design and MA Interior and Spatial Design, as well as members of the Textile Environment Design (TED) research group.
Emma Jacob’s collection entitled ‘Matter’ is a series of container and bag concepts that look at how material sensitivity is used in Art Deco and Wabi-Sabi philosophy.
Textiles is about material qualities; it’s tactility, weight, surface. Emma explores these qualities in their broadest sense by using a wide range of contrasting materials to make unique pieces.
Anna Maria Baranowska’s work ‘Enter Void’ engages with a personal history of an unreturned library book ‘Sämtliche Erzählungen’ by Franz Kafka.
The book was originally taken out of a library in Berlin in 2002; however, when Anna Maria tried to return the late book in 2005 she found that all traces of the library had been obliterated by a shopping centre. ‘Enter Void’ is about acknowledging the unfinished process of the book never being able to be returned to its place of origin.
Over the last ten years Chelsea’s Textile Environment Design (TED) research group has been developing a set of practice-based sustainable design strategies that assist designers in creating textiles that have a reduced impact on the environment.
For Milan Design Week TED will be showing clothing that was developed during a research trip to Hong Kong in 2014.
The shirt was co-created by Professor Becky Earley and eight industry designers from Hong Kong. The garment was made during the ReDress Miele challenge workshop, an educational project that encouraged designers to use recycled materials to their practices. Using traditional local food stuff, a domestic iron, a second hand garment and transfer paper an up-cycled ‘designer’ garment was created.
The skirt by PhD student Emmeline Child draws influence from the dramatic Hong Kong skyline to create a structured up-cycled garment made from clothing hand sourced from a local textile recycling unit.
Both the headdress and shoes are designed by Phd student Bridget Harvey. Taking kitchenware and ingredients as inspiration, her headpiece looks to the food culture of Hong Kong. Hand dyed chopsticks are combined with a netted veil of green, cream and black seeds. Harvey’s shoes are made from wood and are visually similar to traditional footwear of Hong Kong. Both the shoes and the headdress are designed and made to be dismantled and recycled.
Dates: 14 – 19 April 2015
Press view / opening evening: Wednesday 15 April, 20.00 – 22.00
Venue: Ventura Academies, Intersection Via Dei Canzi 19 / Via Gaetano Crespi 24, 20134, Milano – nearest metro is Lambrate
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