I decided it was best not to think about it at all which turned out to be a good thing because it gave me some distance from the work. On Saturday night I found myself able to define my frustrations that I had with my work.
-I was confusing research with googling.
When I presented my work to Winnie & Ricarda last week I had examples of my experiments to show and the rest was the work I had looked at in books and on the web of current knitwear designers. I love all the designers I researched but I was getting completely bogged down in their work. Last semester seemed to be much easier in comparison because the work I was doing didn’t have any exact references that I could research. It was hard at the beginning because I had no clue if it would lead anywhere, but in the end the result was satisfying. Knitwear is loaded with preconceived notions of craft and fashion and I’m finding this hard to forget about. Going back, in year 12 Drama I would chose my solo topic based on which had the most freedom to invent. This took away the dreaded research, but it also took away the temptation to copy. Which is why I found last semester refreshing, I wasn’t constantly referencing other work to justify mine, I was making it up as I went along. Ricarda made an interesting point last Tuesday. She noted that I may not even produce a knitted garment. This was really important to remember because I was thinking so far ahead that in some ways I had already made up my mind of what my work would be. So now I’m trying to focus on structure, not knit.
-Why did I want to use permanent materials?
Simply by using metals/chains in my work I am moving it out of the normal perimeters of fashion. They are not materials that are used in clothing for good reason; they aren’t easy to manipulate, they keep their own structure and they’re uncomfortable. By using these materials you are taking away the very characteristics and advantages of the knit fabric. You’re almost taking away the benefits of the structure, making the warp and weft redundant. Who would have thought this actually took me back to my Triumph work, but now that I think about it I was doing a similar thing there. Taking the functional (underwire) and making its purpose aesthetic.
-The conclusion
In the end I came up with this summary, which I think may get me back on track. I found that the areas I was working with had three different ways of producing structures.
1. The chains needed a body for the structure to be complete. In the image below you can see how when placed on the table it has no shape or structure. The knit looks like a tangled mess of chains. In the second image, the structure can be seen. It’s almost like something came out of nothing. Back to the jewelry tangent, I have a ring (with a chainmail structure) that when it sits in its box, has no shape or structure. Yet when I put it on my finger, it takes its shape, and each finger I put it on the shape will be slightly different.
2. Wire doesn’t need a body to create a structure. The wire I used in my experiments will only bend and curl due to the material, the structure doesn’t matter; it won’t ‘stretch‘ like a normal knit. Even if you had a garment made from the wire, the body would serve no purpose. Again, going back to triumph, the underwire’s created their own structure, they were no longer supporting the body, they were on top of it.
3. The wool yarn will stretch to fit the body. It was interesting to see Mark Fast’s dress hanging in the Endless Garment exhibition. It made you realise how important the body is to his work, because without it, the garment had no life or shape.
So this is where I’m at now. Working between these three oppositions and seeing where the three can cross over.
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