To begin this project we were asked to find a fashion designer we liked to inspire us. I chose Dolce and Gabbana, they stood out with their easy going, relaxed wit. These two work from history acknowledging their roots and teleport those essences into the coming moment, into a new contemporary design which one cannot imagine dating.
Their inspiration they say comes from their love for the Sicilian culture (Domenco Dolce’s home land) and sex appeal. Their ‘Woman of the South’ is “carnal and provocative, yet austere and haughty.” They design for a woman that is inspired by the “realism of Verga’s novels and the atmosphere of realist cinema”, films by Rossellini, Pasolini and Visconti. They say that attitude is fifty percent of fashion “and what makes you feel sexy, modern, or old, interesting or squalid is only attitude” and the woman he designs for is described as mysterious, self-possessed and feminine. In all their work there is a necessary splash of something difficult to measure, what could be described as atmosphere which makes the result rich and magnetic.Therefore I set out to investigate further into the mystery that I see atmosphere to be.
As my two materials I chose glass and lace. The lace was fused into the glass after being placed between two sheets of glass into a kiln over night. Afterwards there were fragile remains left within the glass but the parts which had left the lace as it was destroyed, were captured by the glass in form of soot.
In the installation which followed I tried to set up a paradox between the materials, what we see and what we feel. As neither of the materials the lace or glass (except as in the form of a lens of the projector) are not in the room. But you see the lace and you see wind affecting it but there is some uncertainty of where the image is coming from and a frame hanging between the projector and the projection intensifies that. Mark Taylor discuses (in Surface Consciousness) the different ideas on the definition of surface using philosophies from Leonardo da Vinci, Avrum Stroll’s and molecular science, his conclusion reads: “all of the philosophies class surface as a boundary, therefore are all boundaries surfaces? And then are all thresholds surfaces too?” This inspired me to try and create a paradoxical, ambitious-in-being-confusing work, to perhaps cause viewers to question what reality is.
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The work became a tribute to everything we cannot touch and cannot understand. As a wise person said: “I like when knowledge is rough, wild… To remain that way it has to feed on dialogue… By saying wild, I mean something for which you can’t make an image. Knowledge gets smoothed out because it has to be transmitted.”
This poem accompanied the instalation..
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| From My work |
