Fashion and Jewellery Collaboration - Experimenting

What is it about the act of making a mark on a surface that is just so compelling? 

Many artists evidently explore the possibilities of mark-making...

For one, Rebecca Horn (a personal favourite of mine) uses her body as a site for art-making through performance. She almost exploits the entire physicality of her body by creating some outrageous and mind-blowing accessories that kind of resemble extreme hardware. 

She has invented some of the most striking drawing tools... 

My group wanted to investigate further into some non-traditional ways of mark-making and eventually set out to challenge and explore the relationship between fashion and jewellery through this process. 

We just loved the thought of a jewellery piece magically interacting with a garment,  acting as a form of documentation of bodily movement through its mark-making. 

We thought that the image below summed up our vision perfectly. 

Over the weekend we decided to all meet up and find ways of creating our own natural pigments and instruments for mark-making. Eggs, spices, chalk and food colourings were all some of the ingredients we took pleasure in using. 

Making marks as a kind of performance seemed to be a form of experimenting we were all keen and interested in. But no-one was scared to also voice their own individual fascinations of the whole process. 

It was amazing to listen to and witness the many backgrounds that the other girls came from... (e.g. Anna enjoying the performance aspect of our mark-making, Zoe the ‘fine-artist’ enjoying the painterly side of it all and Hussa intrigued in filming the process) I thus began to realise the true beauty of working with fashion or in design in general. There are just so many infinite possibilities of how your career can develop and where it can lead you. Who knows maybe one day my jewellery might be part of the catwalk... (fingers crossed!) 

Our experimenting kind of reminded us all of a ritual process with all its repetitive gestures, objects and it being taken part within a specific place.  Perhaps this could be part of a performance for our final outcome? Who knew at this stage...it was just an idea.

By this point it was time for our first progress review with the tutors. We thought that mounting our ideas onto a pin board would be an effective and clear way of trying to explain our thought-processes. In many ways my aesthetics are very clean and structured and I love helping out in any way possible, so I didn't mind taking it upon myself to make the moodboard. 

The fact that the tutors were excited by our starting point really uplifted the mood of the group - it got us that more determined and motivated to nail it. We were advised to research into rituals and existing garments as well as instruments for mark-making in terms of jewellery.

A huge part of today’s fashion, I guess, lives from the reinvention of its past. So researching into the history of it all seems essential in terms of taking the next step…. the ideas and designing of our collection. But we need to remember that we need to elaborate on the information and research we get, adding a great deal of our group personality into it and making it essentially our own. 

We looked into chalk lines as part of research for jewellery (a chalked string used in the building trades to make a straight line on a vertical surface). 

We even had a go at creating our own. We enjoyed the plucking motion of the string. It made us feel as if we were a kind of body harp. 

We were advised to experiment with adding some form of weights onto the strings and Anna (in fashion design) even took this a step further by incorporating weights within a garment, seeing whether they would have a direct effect on the silhouette of the piece or on her performance of bodily movement....

By the end of the day we had all planned to meet in the morning to discuss further ideas and designs.

So far so good in the group!

(To be continued...)