MELTING...
This collection is oriented from Anna’s personal experience about lossing her grandma, which records an experience of “Loss and Rememberance” based on the reflection of the Chinese view of life and death and traditianl Chinese funeral culture.
Anna Zhang was born in a big family in Huizhou, China. She grew up under the nourishment of Chinese family love, which makes her to regards the relationship between family members as important. After lossing her grandma 7 years ago, Anna has experienced a long-term and conplex emotional journey, which for her, is valuable to be recorded.
“Melting” the memories
LOSS
Burning, a ritual movement, is a traditioanl way of communicating with the dead. It reflects the Y
in(Negative and Yang(Positive) concept in Chinese culture - the living and the dead live in opposite worlds.
Burning is also an emotional process. It represents painful and irreversible loss. and the gradual blurring of memories as time changes.
Burning is a keyword as a combination of the culture background and Anna’s personal mood of loss. As a start point of the whole story, Anna shows the process of burning by creative textile design.
Burning, a ritual movement, is a traditioanl way of communicating with the dead. It reflects the Y
in(Negative and Yang(Positive) concept in Chinese culture - the living and the dead live in opposite worlds.
Burning is also an emotional process. It represents painful and irreversible loss. and the gradual blurring of memories as time changes.
Burning is a keyword as a combination of the culture background and Anna’s personal mood of loss. As a start point of the whole story, Anna shows the process of burning by creative textile design.
The most beautiful moments of burning is the status of “in between”, they are catched and frozen on the knitting bottom fabric.
The “burning” materials mixing knitting and heat-transfer printing techiniques is self-created and 100% made by hand. It’s not really made by burning, but in a safer and more sustainable way. Tons of experients were launched to test out the most suitable material and the best production mode.
The final results are stable and ready to be worn. The different qualities of knitting and non-woven fabric makes it to show a undulating texture.
Because of ink jet heat transfer print, the material shows a bright color tone. The colors fade and natually change by the process of “burning”.
The material has a great potential
to be made in normal fashion categories, such as shirt and suits, even shoes and bags. It can also be used to cast the shape of any 3D sculptures, which gives much inspiration about 3D experiments.
Anna has done some human-sized experiments to record different natual status of the material when it’s “burned”, and observed how does it interact with the body.
“Skin” completes the textile language in this story, a static body and the moving fabric represents Anna’s struggling experience of fighting against the disappearing memories. The material shows a strong mood only when it’s performed on human’s skin.
BODIES
Hugging with a person in the negative world.
“Body” is a keyword in 3D exploration process of this project. Inspired by Chinese “Yin””Yang” culture, the positive and negative shapes concept is applied into the 3D modeling experiments.
By modeling various of hugging positions and removing one body from another, Anna gets some incomplete body sculptures, the empty space shows the shape of another body.
By changing the light positions, the negative body will perform in different ways.
Anna tries to cast the sculpture’s shape with knit, which directly develops the sculpture into a outfit.
In order to create a new body for the model, Anna worked on the “second skin” by knitting lace with fine yarn, the knitting pattern is mainly inspired by human’s natural skin texture like wrinkles and blood vessels.
The items in the tailoring line tell the same story of “another body” by pattern making.
REMEMBERANCE
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“Rememberance” about the past people is a sweet stuff leaves in our mind, Anna shows her memories about her grandma in her childhood by applying emboidery to make the special water soluble lace.
The lace pattern is abstracted from the people’s outline in Anna’s family photo.
Inspired from the body scultures, Anna captures the “negative body” and edits it into embroidery patterns according to the body’s wrinkles flowing trend.
To outline embroidery pattern, the knitting fabric at the bottom is layered and the skin color comes out at some thinner parts with less lace layers.
