After this nice electronic textiles workshop, we have been participating to Jon Pettersen courses about digital weaving for two weeks. It was an intense and week of hard work to understand how the technics can manage to create your thought through the fabric. Learning the process of bindings in one or many layers has been rather complicated but also really helpfull for our furure creations. From an idea to photoshop and programming we could have build files and understand how a weaved fabric really works. Sometimes till midnight, i ve spent time with the digital loom. It was a long process to get the right effect and the feeling of what i wanted to achieve. And these slow hours were needed to understand the meaning of weaving.
After one week and a half trying, we get the chance to see how it looks like on an industial loom in Innvik. That was a great trip where we could see how beautifull is the landscape and the quietness of Norway. We arrived with the bus after six hours in a such a small and peaceful place called Innvik. Nobody around to disturb the silence of the sea. We stayed one night there and spend most of the time in the factory, trying to get a piece of fabric for each of us.
The fabric i designed is made out of the drawings i’m used to make as an expression of concept or an atmosphere i want to catch. The theme for our ETT program is Home and the others. Then i drew the ideas i had about it and how i saw it as a common and shared scene of life.
Concept:
The blanket wich keep warm when we are cold, the light coming througt the textile of a lamp, the morning wich wake up throught the curtains… We all think it is really special. The daily life wich is rather personal, is shared in a common thought. The home landscapeness is seen by the eyes of others. The sleeping room, corners, doors and closets are parts of these archetypes we all share with our own identity. The house we build, the one we rebuild when we had lost it, the one we never stops to build… Home, more than a landscape show your heart and these feelings are whared in mental pieces. These lines and feelings that we can all understand. The night lamp is standing over the little table next to the bed, a table clothe is covering the dinner table, the car is parked next to the house, the walls limit the space, the sofa next to the living room… We belong to these lines, surfaces and codes even if we also try to break it.
How can i create this common event of daily life ? How a fabric or an object can create these mental thoughts ?
So i drew the contour of these common lines. And i wanted to use the drawing as a stitch on a matress fabric where the lines become memories of house landscapeness. After many try outs, and the help of Yon and Kari we could have get this matress feeling with 3 times fillings between two layers. And the result in Innik was close to my wishes.
It was a great experience to strat from the beginning of the conception of a fabric and then to see it ending in a factory where the mistake is not allowed anymore…I did learn a lot through the bindings and get closer to the fabric by the technics. I guess now i can use it as a tool and try to bring it further into my work…
émilie pallard (from the Design Academy Eindhoven, at the KHIB for the ETT program)
