Time and Influence: A fashion project with University of the Arts London

The fashion project is a collaboration between Tate and University of the Arts, London. It’s really about giving students a taste of what it means to be a fashion designer, right from the moment of your first idea through to research, development of an idea, into the manifestation of that in an actual show at Tate Britain. The project is themed Time & Influence. It’s looking at the ideas around chronology, looking at the Tate displays and the archives. The students who take part are young people, first in their family to consider further education. It’s really shaped me into who I guess I am as an artist today. It really deepens my contextual knowledge and it really opened my eyes to things that I wasn’t aware of. This year the students have looked at a number of artists and artworks at Tate Britain, including Kurt Schwitters. The project has also looked at the Basic Design display at Tate Britain. It’s from this moment and the people whose works are in this room, who designed the kind of art education that everyone is still going through today. One of the important opportunities we had with this was to retrieve material from archives and to give them the same status as works of art. And I think that’s a very different experience for the viewer. We have photographs, documents, and I think probably the most helpful things we have is some archival film. What we are actually displaying is a process, so to do that we need to think about what was actually happening. The archival material has really helped give an idea of where that history of design and design teaching comes from. When I first came to the show I was really interested in the work that Schwitters did while he was in the internment camp and I found that really inspiring that he was so consumed to create no matter where he was and whatever he had around him and it was really interesting seeing the archive films and understanding more in depth about his processes. What I found really interesting about his work is the way he was thinking beyond the canvas, which I think is really good when you’re thinking about fashion. Ultimately it’s going to be on a body which isn’t a flat thing, so you’ve got to think in 3D. We’ve been working with the students straight away in three dimensions with simple materials like paper, card and wire to make three dimensional forms on the body inspired by the artwork in this gallery. Everything is about cutting and ripping, using different coloured and textured papers, magazines, newspapers and collaging, and responding to the work. It was really nice to watch student’s ideas developing and starting in the gallery. They were enthused initially I think by the artist talks and then they started looking at images and artworks and archive works and really kind of using it as a creative laboratory. At central St Martins they started to look design, how they use a sketchbook, how they develop ideas and they start to make and create the garments physically. And during the whole process there is always a reference to the research which is done at Tate Britain. Well most of the young people we work with have never been into a gallery before, have never used art or an archive before as research. So I think the value of using the gallery and the collection and the archive is that it enables them to develop skills that they can go on to use both as students and as designers. My design at the moment consists of mainly lines and structure and shapes which is inspired by the Schwitters exhibition. The atmosphere at the moment is not so intense but kind of really relaxed, we’re just really busy getting on with our work and feeling very inspired. My visit to Tate Britain really changed my views. It inspired me because I was lucky to be there at the time when there was this exhibition of Kurt Schwitters, this Dadaist artist, who combined different ideas and put them together in his work, and I was able to stay there for a substantial amount of time even after closing time. Through that I was able to feel the inspiration and feed onto the art that was there, and all of that inspired the work that I’ve been doing today. Today I’ve just been working in the workshop, trying to create my final piece into something visual and I’m working on acrylic, cutting out different shapes because my theme is geometric shapes. So at the end of the project, all that work culminates into a fashion show at Tate Britain which is really an impactful one on the space, impactful for the students just to have achieved that in such an iconic space, if you want, for British art. Seeing my design go up and down the catwalk at the Tate was amazing because it’s my first step into fashion. So having the first piece that I’ve ever made on display for everyone to see was just kind of crazy. From the first time I came to Tate to do research I feel much more confident and really involved with the works that I've seen and I was able to take good inspiration from it. Next I’ll be doing Foundation Art & Design in St Martins. It’s been giving me a really good insight into Central St Martins and University of the Arts London, so I’m really excited to start this September. I’m ready for the next step if there’s a part two or something, bring it on. It was very beneficial, thank you so much, I wish I could go through it again. And I’d encourage anyone out there to do it. Next step for me, fashion designer.