Bionics- Learning from nature.
Looking at how a dead, shrivelled Herbaceous plant can be made beautiful again. Looking at Bionics in a metaphorical way, I will create a poetic story. Usually the dead, limp flower would be thrown away, however I want to explore its delicate, fragile beauty. This will, in turn help one to appreciate what we would normally chose to ignore.
Using weave and material manipulation, I will translate the petals vascular bundle and look at how to create a fragile, detailed appearance. Focusing not mainly on colour, but structure and texture I will also try to create some 3 dimensional textiles with a double warp with weave. Material such as polyfilament yarn and nylon with give quite a structured effect. I will also try different yarns in the weft such as paper, polyester and plastic to test which is more 3 dimensional.
Showing the hidden beauty of the dried flower using a gathering method with natural fabrics such as silk, without using stitch. I am also very interested in looking at how the fragile state of the petals can be translated in an inflexible way.
All in all, I will try and exhaust each idea as much as I can, in different ways and hope to come up with some interesting results.
I am very happy with the weaving results. Using different warps meant that each is slightly different and each was made to be quite loose so that the fibres are able to move around slightly. I thought this would be quite nice if light were to be shone through. Also using the white nylon fibre meant that I was able to paint the fabric in the colours like the petal. This gives a very luxury touch to the material. I also tried this with paper yarn which meant that it was very fragile, just like the petal, however the structure did not really represent anything to do with my work.
I tried using a range of different materials to see which gave the best results and found that latex was rather effective. It really represented the delicate forms of the petal, however the actual touch and feeling of the sample did not. If I were to carry on with this project, I would really like to do something else with this on a bigger scale, incorporating colour somehow and maybe playing around with the density and weight.
When using the silk jersey, I pulled threads out which gave a creased effect. I was very happy with these results and tried a few variations of this. Using glue meant that I could stiffen the fabric.
If I were to stay until the end, I would plan on using ceramics and more weave to create a vascular bundle effect that is made inflexible. I like this idea as it opposes the original form of the dead petals and I feel that if it were to be more steardy and strong, people may not disregard this as if it were a dead flower.
