The inspiration for this collection of textile prints is my emotional response to mobile technology. While I am a huge supporter of technological innovation, I believe that mobile technology tends to be incredibly detrimental to the way in which younger generations interact. While many act as though their tech is some sort of obligation, checking it every time it vibrates, I believe we should use mobile tech as a tool and that alone. In response, I wanted to create a series of textile prints based on natural objects and processes. The idea was that these prints would be aggressive enough to visually attack any viewers, while the garment structures will be defensive. The symbol I created to start working with is reminiscent of a scale or a tooth. That is to say that it is very aggressive, but could easily be stacked into a more defensive structure. I integrated this symbol into images of natural processes or objects such that it would not be obvious that it was artificial until the viewer notices the use of this symbol throughout the collection.
Design process:
The original photograph that would become the rust pattern
Large pattern, which I found to be useful for textural images
Bark Tile One tile, which would become the bark pattern
Almost all of my pieces come from a combination of working from some sort of plan and working from intuition. One principle that guided my collection of images was the observation that photographs with depth tended not to look great when mirrored. My plan came from the idea of the collection, so I spent the week looking out for interesting natural objects (leaves, bark, water) or processes (rust, decay etc). I tried to photograph them in such a way that they wouldn’t appear to have depth. After that, I tried combining my symbol with the photographs in several ways. This part was somewhat intuitive and just involved playing around with the symbol/ pattern and each image. In some images, I changed the hue, and in others I adjusted brightness, contrast and levels settings. I think I’ve learned that textured images work best with bigger symbol combinations (the rust pattern) and images that relate to objects (cacti/pebble pattern) need to have the symbols hidden a bit more throughout. I would have to say that in all honesty a lot of my work tends to be intuitive. This is not to say it isn’t based in logic, so much as it isn’t based in logic that is apparent to me at the time of the creation of the work. After I am done making something, I can generally look at it, and see what about the idea of the piece spoke to me. Generally I am capable of doing this intuitive type work once I have a general guiding theme.
One challenge I had during this process was that of curation. While playing in photoshop, I designed this motorcycle based pattern which I really loved. It seems that this doesn’t really fit with the rest of my collection theme, so I felt like I should get rid of it. but I was too interested in the pattern to do that. I think it was acceptable to keep it in the swatch book with the understanding that it would probably not make it as a print to this collection…
