Our Textile Graduate Day on the 19th is our first opportunity to promote new graduate makers within our textiles community.
We are really delighted by the work that they plan to share with us. This is our second post sharing a little bit more from each graduate about their practice in their own words.
Read about Isobel Caine and Kate Sims here
MEGAN LEECH
Starting from an interest in how people exist and interact with the spaces around them, I create work that captures a balance of movement and stillness exploring the beauty of the mundane. This collection focuses on the kitchen as a space of freedom and liberty where order and chaos meet. I have been exploring the possibilities of limitation viewing the warp and weft as a space that is simultaneously controlled and uncontrolled creating a response to the gestural abstraction movement.
I started responding to action painting. I created paintings that were made with kitchen utensils and my hands, trying to capture the craft of cooking. Inspired by Helen Frankenthaler, I wanted to depict a sense of spontaneity and freedom. These paintings were then analysed, and I placed a sense of order into them, picking up colour proportions or shapes.
Inspired by ikat, I created a process of working where I paint the warp and weft of my samples prior to them being woven. Through this process, disorder is then reintroduced. The samples explore the interaction of colour and the bleeding effect suggests movement despite being still. I celebrate craft in my work, using hand techniques alongside the jacquard. I will have a collection of light to medium weight silk and cotton samples. Intended for the body, I envisage them as Kimono inspired garments, where the fabric becomes an extension of the body enriching the symbiosis of body and space.
SVEN STEINMETZ
My work is questioning the division between textile and garment.
Instead of cutting the pattern out of the textile, I am setting it into the weave. Thereby, garment and fabric are created at the same moment. This simultaneous creation demands a new way of coding the pattern; darts and seams transform into other geometric shapes or dissolve completely.
Further, an adaptation of the loom is necessary. Therefore, I am redesigning the parts of the machine that hold the yarn under tension, to allow more motion during the weaving process to happen.
I am working with the wool of the Romney Marsh breed and am able to therefore break my process down from garment to fibre. In terms of processing, the wool has not been to any other place than England, including my weaving.
This cross-disciplinary way of proceeding gives me the chance to set my work in a new context, which is now moving between garment, textile and machine.
As a final conclusion of my practice, I aim to create seamless garments. To research the forms that are going to be woven, I am using a mannequin based on my mother’s body, as well as developing new shapes during the weaving process itself.