Daily inspiration

Daily inspiration

Fashion and Jewellery collaboration - Final piece

And here we are...some photos and stills from our short film (and of course the film itself), edited by our group member, Hussa. Her strong passion and determination for editing film made us all trust her skills to create something beautiful with our final piece. That she did...

It was shot within a construction site for a developing shopping area (our final choice of 'shop window' set by the brief at the start) . The churned up earth related well to the ritualistic aspect of our piece and the fact that it is a building site links in with the whole idea of mark-making and process. 

We used black ink, coffee and turmeric as our pigments to stain and mark the garment. We thought that their organic, natural hues would do the job perfectly. 

I love how this performance was just a one-time thing - no marks on the garment could have ever been re-created by the jewellery or movement of the body in the exact, same way. The messi-ness of it all was so un-me but it was so so great - it's taught me the wonders of letting-go! 

Although at the time (during filming) we were all very 'highly-strung', in that we all wanted to get involved in some way or another, looking back, we all actually did have a good laugh! 

Enjoy...

Fashion and jewellery collaboration - In the making...

My confidence when it comes to making (especially with anything involving metal) is still pretty low... and especially when you know that you're working in a group, it makes it that much harder and more of a pressure to not make mistakes. That's why I was more than happy to go out and source the materials and get things organised in a sketchbook and power-point rather than to start drilling precisely measured out holes into our final wooden halo.  It just wasn't just my piece after all, it was all of ours. 

I know that in the past (with maths being a weakness of mine) I have been prone to making mistakes with taking specific measurements under pressure, and I didn't want it to effect the whole groups final piece! So on that note, Elizabeth and I went out around London to find all the things we needed, whilst other members got technical...

I made a list (a seemingly recurring action within our group!): 

• string (and lots of it!) 
• metal tubing 
• metal wire for our handmade hooks
• some form of weights
• embroidery hoops (three, and all different sizes)
• some form of natural pigments (for our performance piece)
• bowls to contain the pigments
• eyelets for the drilled  holes 

Sourcing materials, and discovering new places was really important to me anyway, because I guess as a jewellery designer, knowledge of materials is always required to transform ideas into tangible pieces. So, it really did prove useful. 

One thing we all didn't think of though, was how each beaded string would jumble together once movement was applied to the piece...This was a real test to all our levels of patience! (something we all found out we didn't have much of when it came to untangling string...) It took us up to three hours to un-knot the mass of mess - and this did not just happen once, but so many times so, that Xiosha, Elizabeth and I seemed to have mastered the technique of untangling by the end of it. 

In terms of the fashion, I had never made patterns before – When I used to make my own things at a young age, I had always just sort of made it up and learnt from mistakes... So when I saw how technical and precise and how skillful the fashion students were being, I was so truly impressed (and if not a little envious.)

When it came to shooting the film, (although tensions were slightly high at times as everyone was slightly fed up, frustrated and exhausted by this point) we all really worked well as a team. Funnily enough, the annoying complexity of our piece actually helped bring us all together. There was always more than two hands needed...

When it came to discuss how we were going to present our final piece, we had several options:

1) to perform our ritualistic piece in front on everyone on the day - with no film and discuss

2) to present a film of our performance with our model wearing the final product in the background and discuss our ideas with the help of a power point presentation.

The group was very much divided between the two. Although having the performance live would have been more powerful, we all ended up deciding on option 2) and, as a result, the film is something we all now have for life and can share with everyone else too....