Drawing exclusively from the Westminster Menswear Archive this exhibition explores the invisibility of menswear due to its intrinsic design language that concentrates on the reiterations of archetypal garments intended for specific functional, technical or military use. It will illustrate how designers have disrupted this through minimal, yet significant modifications to produce outcomes that both replicate and subvert their source material.
Through this approach, the language of menswear has developed an almost fetishistic appreciation of the working man in all his heroic iterations, referencing the clothing of seafarers, soldiers, athletes, firefighters, road workers, explorers, and scientists.
This design strategy has, for the most part, allowed men and what they wear to avoid scrutiny; these garments have remained invisible within fashion exhibitions in favour of only presenting menswear as the story of the dandy or the peacock.
This exhibition aims to shine a light on these invisible men.
Details of the chain and lion.
Bright yellow leather with function detail design.
Futuristic design combined with simple lines as decoration.
Choice of fabric,function,weather,tempcture,flexiblility.
Interesting details combined with function and current fashion style.
The same day I visited Tate modern for Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition.
It would be hard to think of a more beguiling show than the Olafur Eliasson survey at Tate Modern. It opens with a waterfall of spectacular proportions and continues with a journey through the elements, including – literally – earth, sea and fire. Anyone who remembers lying dazed beneath Eliasson’s gigantic glowing sun in the Turbine Hall, in 2003, will know how hypnotic the Danish-Icelandic artist’s work can be. The scale is more modest here, but no less mesmerising.
The first room of the show is instantly dramatic: a cosmology, as it seems, housed in a single vast vitrine. The hundreds of objects before you – suspended, heaped, tumbling, static – are beautiful yet humble. Made of not much more than paper, wood, wire or wax, they are Eliasson’s prototypes, the models he keeps (or used to keep: they are now in Sweden’s Moderna Museet) in his studio.
Eliasson, who was born in 1967, grew up in Denmark but spent his summers in Iceland. An early work here is called “no It takes the form of a single white circle, almost invisible against the white gallery wall, except that its shape is described by tiny flames, cold blue gas at their centre. Nearby, set directly into another wall, is a large glass sphere that turns the world upside down. In this white room the world appears black, somehow, until you walk into the sepulchral darkness of the gallery next door, where the effect is reversed. Each piece conveys the strange extremes of Iceland with all the condensed power of a sonnet.
The most entrancing experience is possibly the simplest: a room of quiet rain, through which rainbows play in the misty spray. It is titled, with unarguable and irreducible truth,”beauty” The sublime effects of nature are fleeting yet an artist can hold them before you for as long as you wish, in this case with nothing more than a spotlight, a pump and some hoses.
I decided to join fashion student for a Subtraction Cutting lecture before communication path way school trip ,we had a subtraction lecture few weeks ago, I found it was a very interesting technique and a unique way of thinking,
Julian was explaining us about the rules of crop and sew the fabric.
The garments are created from flat pattern methods, or from drape methods, the way of cutting makes the most of the negative spaces that can be opened up in fabric. and the drape experimental garments resulting breaks the boundaries of the usual garment shapes.
The techniques often build from the shape of an initial flat piece of material. This initial material is then sliced or opened up with holes, allowing the material to be twisted upon itself, fed through itself or enlarged with more pieces of fabrics.
The resulting garments make the most of the volume of the fabric and often look incredibly complex. Individual garments are often very reminiscent of the work of Japanese designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto and can also often be worn in more than one way, using the placement of your body and limbs to change the shape of the garment.
The work of British artist Rachel Kneebone 399 days. Her work is based on white ceramics. The work is exquisite and gorgeous. This is extremely difficult in the process of making ceramics. it’s part of the reason why her works always have left a deep impression on the viewers. This work uses highly simulated flowers, legs and plants to create a twisted look that combines classic art with contemporary art.
Rachel Kneebone’s choice of material as white porcelain stems from her long-standing awe of this material. She hopes to explore more possibilities in this medium. She draws her own external attention to the internal physics. In the characteristics, she uses the lustre of ceramic itself to express the rheology and rhythm of the object. Because of the limitations of the deformation during the making process, it is under this change that she has established a language of her own.
The state of being very malleable, becoming dry and hard, and finally showing it as a shiny, seemingly fluid state through firing. In the process of firing, the material will shrink, so now the volume of the work is only 80% before entering the kiln.
The unique white color of porcelain is very unique. that’s one of the reason in my practice i decided to use the orginal white colour.The so-called “meaning” is always vague and indefinite, and continues to present such a “fuzzy” state. In a sense, our life experience is built outside the language. Although we need words to communicate, the text can only reach an “approximate” state, it can never fully expressed by words. Perhaps for this reason, this piece is showing in body language.
My creative work in stage one includes print making, sculpture, installation, photography, moving image and sound design.I believe that each of these disciplines is essential in forming a cohesive line of thought, each reflecting an individual perspective and mode of interpretation, unified in the mind of my audience. These forms complement and serve as contrasts to one another, highlighting a range of unexplored possibilities that support my current practices, and are constantly evolving to influence my work in the future. Acrossing stage one and In my work in general, I always endeavor to question contemporary issues in a direct way, and through this questioning, I aim to evoke critical discussions which my audience can resonate with easily.
With my praactice, I aim to provide my audiences with a very clear and ordered atmosphere by applying symbolic elements with geometric structures, solid lines and simplified colours, encouraging them to engage and interact with my visual pieces. In my practice, I work with various materials and techniques, and explore restructuring and creating different combinations, for example in my recent project, I projected moving images on a sculpture made with plaster and foil. The projected video, with a solid red colour, creates an interesting relationship between the audience and the sculpture ― they are the audience and they are also part of the sculpture.
Through my work, I aim to expose core truths evident in the world around me, but which often obfuscated by the pace and incessant bombardment of modern communication platforms. For example, in my Manifesto project, I drew from the Swiss artist Fabian Oefner’s work to, instead of deconstruct the tools with which the external world is captured and conveyed, deconstruct the products of such devices, reverting them from an intangible form of information to physical compositions that can be dissected and analyzed from multiple angles, thus prompting my audience to contemplate the veracity, agenda, structure, and comprehensive effect of the media on global opinions and political and societal evolution.
I find myself drawn to concepts that surpass the restrictions of culture, class, and status; ubiquitous themes that pervade all societies and that even the most marginalized among us can relate to. I’m equally influenced by everyday objects, events, people, poetry and artists and observations, and in the next coming stage, I plan to keep investigating different techniques to use in my practice in order to communicate with my audience in a productive and engaging way, as I strive to speak for the voiceless, challenge fallaciously prescribed norms, and make sense of a world that grows in complexity with each passing day.
In stage two I hope to further develop project 2 and 3,with more critical thinking and research method.
When there’s so much to say but got no one to talk to
I didn’t have enough cash when I needed to pay for the sandwich
When I got mugged in the street,it was during the day there were people,but nobody helped me
My dog cola got very sick,vet said it’s too late,he passed away a while ago painfully,I really wish I could help him
I was alone in when my only family member passed away , I stood overnight in the wind tried to figure out how’s my life gonna be
waiting for the bus for an hour and half , the bus didn’t come, hands are too cold slightly getting numb, I have phone in the pocket but no one to call
An old man fell to the ground.He struggled for a long time but could not get up. I tried to lift him up. But the old man has problems with his legs and couldn’t support himself, and I put my hands under his arms and tried to lift him again, but it was really, really hard.I looked around, people come and go, they are tacit understanding of the automatic screening of this scene, many people and I look into the eyes also look away.I really felt helpless at that moment.
The object I inspires from V&A was the sculpture piece “399 days” from Rachel Kneebone, Kneebone’s intensely modeled figurative scenarios un fold into coral-like eruptions of limbs and organic forms.Resonating with its Renaissance surroundings within the V&A galleries, literary allusions to Ovid and Dante collide with sculptural echoes of Michelangelo and Bernini. Here the body, and multiplied beyond imagination, reaches a visceral intensity beyond the boundaries conventionally ascribed to it.
I got influenced by everyday events, people, and observations. When I was in the process of gathering ideas about this project there were 2 personal experience has strong effective to my practice.
First one was I got bullied in public I needed help but no one offers.
Second one was an old man fell over in front of his house badly injured, until I came to help him , he’ve been sitting there couldn’t get up for a while ,people walked pass by like he didn’t exist.
Situations like this made me think that, although we all find ourselves in situations where we hope someone can help us, when others are in need, are we ourselves willing to offer help?
In order to investigate further, I started to gather other people’s personal experiences of moments they needed help and moments they offered help when it’s needed.
During the process of investigating I find gestures often involves either when people needed help or offering help, the gestures can represent a role in different situations.
Then I started to explore making model with plaster and have some experimental tests with applying different materials on/mix with the plaster to create a different texture.
skin-like expirement, plaster&latex.
wrikle expirement, latex&paper.
skin2, latex&plaster
At the same time except the interviews with people, I’ll also take a model of their hands in different gesture.
When each model hand represents a different person with different background and different situation, the model is not just a cold plaster piece anymore, it become more alive. And by putting the hands together it become a symbolic language of gestures.
When projected the stories I collected on the sculpture ,the twisted words are representing the situations when someone couldn’t get the help because misunderstanding or lack of understanding .Later on I’ll continue work on this project,to have a deeper reaserch and also make background sound to make the piece more complish.
The relationship between man and nature has been a driving force behind the arts, philosophical thought, design, technology, and spirituality since the dawn of civilization. Through the project Navigators, my group and I aim to explore this relationship in the modern world, conducting a series of surveys together and selecting a representative product of urban nature and people, taking the park as a starting point.
Via mediums including but not limited to photography and video, interviews with people of different genders, ages, nationalities, and occupations, as well as through a series of personal experimental experiences, we aim to analyze our relationship with nature, influenced by related concepts explored by other artists, and we combine our experiences and feelings to summarize the topics we believe to be the most worthy of further contemplation.
In the interview with 10 people, I find that the fact we built the city is based on destroy the nature, and then we built parks in the city because we need some natural environment to improve the environment of the city. We would always try to make changes to fit our perspective.
The super geometric shaped trees and man-made plants in the parks make me think of the desire of people to dominate and control things and the need to retain awareness and respect vis-à-vis nature.
I take it upon ourselves to contort animals, plants, and even other individuals as much as we can. This ability to change and create in the process of human development is reinforced by our mastery of technology and knowledge. The desire for human intervention and control has increasingly become a reality. Early humans revered nature, and the totems of ancient tribes were made up of animals, plants, or natural phenomena, however, Although this phenomenon of worship still exists, such as India’s worship of cattle, now with the development of knowledge and technology, we are giving less respect to nature, but more negative impacts, such as the impact of people on the climate, artificially caused the population of species to decrease or extinction, and the evolution of human intervention species.
it inspired me to show in my practice the contribution of the activities people used to do to pay respect to nature and nowadays the activities people do gives a negative impact on nature.
I also started to do an experimental photography collection to get the idea of using people’s sympathetic communicate with my audiences.
behind the bars.
the prisoners.
the great escape.
homelessness.
The artist Nunzio Paci’s paintings fully demonstrate the inseparable relationship between man and nature. Although only one of nature’s many creatures, humans always strive stand out as independent entities, different from nature’s other creations and forever seeking to dominate the natural world. We often forget that we come from nature, and without it, we are nothing. Through this project, I hope to build upon Paci’s concept of interrelatedness and inseparability, to both illustrate the fact that we cannot surpass the divine, and that the essence of nature in fat resides within us all. Through commenting on man’s manipulation of the natural world through various related film clips and highlighting our desire for control and artificial perfection through artifices such as supergeometry, I expose how futile our efforts to elevate ourselves beyond the natural world truly are — nature creates us, but we cannot create nature.
In this project I wanted to present as moving image, video clip combine with the sound I produced. I personally have always been looked up to Stanley Kubrick’s work, he often uses geometric structures in his work which I also tend to use very often. I used some clips overlapping for showing the contribution situations for example when people hunting people is cruel but people hunting animals is fun. I try to bring people a higher level of sympathy to other species.
Ambush
Attack
The sound I produced was inspired by a random church experience.
After speaking to the congregation, I discovered that some use religion as a means of taking control of their destinies by following a set of traditions, rules and beliefs in order to achive a desired outcome — eternal happiness in the afterlife. This in turn made me think of how humans play the role of god with regards to other species, so the track include part of christian funeral song as a hint of if we keep making decisions based on what we want it will eventually lead us to an end.
Kubrick’s classic war epic is not only notable for its striking cinematography, but also for the haunting moral questions it poses — questions which resonate through the annals of history and can be applied to all acts of human belligerence to this day. The themes of this film match perfectly with that of my work, and thus I chose to use several clips from this film to both illustrate and emphasize the themes of dehumanization and abused power. In the film, Kubrick presents the recruits as oppressed, insignificant drones, even from the opening scene where we see their heads being shaved, their individuality literally being stripped from them and cast to the ground.
By using a specially-designed lens in the barracks scenes, each recruit is kept in focus, symbolizing the fact that none of them are special — they are all equal and should receive the same treatment.
This idea of conformity runs throughout the entire first section of the film, and is reflected using repetitious images that strip the actors of their identities and individuality.
It is clear from the narrative and imagery used that Kubrick is anti-war, and he conveys this sentiment by building a sense of realism, such as carefully recreating warzones and locales, even going so far as to import hundreds of palm trees to the set, and allowing his Director of Photography to experiment using a camera with its shutter thrown off sync to create a realistic effect when filming combat scenes. This heightened realism immerses the audience completely, making the psychological collapses of the film’s characters all the more impactful and effective in conveying the system of dehumanization inflicted upon them.
Needless to say Full Metal Jacket successfully communicates Kubrick’s ideas in an accessible, but profound way, and I hope to achieve a similar balance in my future work. This film has shown me that attention to detail is crucial in presenting a convincing and immersive experience, and that skillfully manipulating the visual field can allow one to direct the audience’s attention to the most critical elements of one’s work. When working in a visual medium, this mastery over direction is something that can play a huge role in effecting the full impact of a piece, and is something that I am actively working to achieve.
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