Posted: January 25, 2015
Material/Fabric
It all began with a generous donation of 16 suit protectors by ScrapXL, a neighbouring shop that sells industry waste and left-overs. Printed on the fabric is a generic stock image denoting the commercial idea of ‘freedom’, ‘youth’, ‘carelessness’, the kind that can be ‘attained’ by purchasing a product.
Sketches
Freedom vs. restriction, something very familiar to me as a designer asserting an artistic freedom within a given assignment, as a body moving in a manufactured and over-designed landscape, as a second-generation immigrant searching for freedom of expression in one place and yet landing into another place with other kinds of cultural and political restrictions.
I started to play around with this tension and started to manifest this contradiction by drawing up 3 suits with the fabric that lock the body into certain positions;
1) strait jacket, alluding to madness.
2) cocoon that traps the body into a position that it can only type behind a computer, referencing a prevailing contemporary affliction.
3) and another more playful one…this one still needs working out.
Prototype 1: The Strait Jacket
Prototype 2: The Computer Cocoon
Prototype 3: The ‘Funny’ One.
Top part of all three of them
Experiments.....