Lillian Stephenson

Week 1 – Introduction to Sustainability

For this week I chose to expand on the embroidery threads I had photographed as I really liked the colour mix in the photos -especially after seeing Gerhard Richter’s six paintings in the Tate Modern where he had continuously layered paint over his canvas (sort of like how the embroidery threads are layered).

Here I used markers and oil pastels to create an observational drawing and then a more abstract like one which I have translated onto fabric using machine and hand stitching. The idea is for the machine stitching to be quite messy while the hand stitching layers it and is more refined.

Week 2 – Emerging Technologies

Fashion visualisations using Photoshop. I like how the different textures from the embroidery piece show through these designs and make them more interesting.

Week 3 – Nature

To make these pieces I used an orange skin to create these prints onto the paper, sticking to my previous colour theme. I like how textural these designs came out to be.

Week 4 – Cultural Sustainability

The Windrush Frontroom, 22nd October 2023, The Horniman Museum.

Here I viewed the Windrush Front Room which exhibited a Windrush era living room with music, objects, clothes and furnishing that would have been seen in a 1940s-1950s living room belonging to Caribbean people who travelled to the UK from the Caribbean. I think it’s important to look back on the past and hear about people’s experiences/culture and as someone with Jamaican heritage it was nice to see familiar objects/decor that I used to see in my grandparent’s (from the Windrush generation) house.

Week 5 – Empathy

Here are my watercolour responses to Week 5’s lecture, I chose to use shades of blue for my response because of the calming connotations this colour has. Shades of blue are known to have a tranquil and relaxing effect on people which is why it’s seen in hospitals and valued in the medical community because of this association with trust, cleanliness and focus.

CRITICAL REVIEW

I feel that the work that has been uploaded at the start of this project was a good insight into the sustainability brief. I think gathering my ideas and notes in response to the first lecture was a successful way of generating initial ideas of what it means to be sustainable in your work and how being sustainable links to more creative and curious design. The first approach to this task was to use materials and resources I already had in the house. As a starting point, I gathered together a bunch of my embroidery threads and layered them over each other, showing how I can use things in my everyday reach to inform my projects. The aim was to later show an awareness in the types of threads used and how they affect the sustainability of my work. My second approach was to focus on reusing old material and so I found a few clothes that I no longer wear and photographed them. Looking back, I could have moved this idea along by arranging these clothes on a mannequin or use the materials for textiles samples. However I am really happy with how I’ve translated my abstract drawing onto fabric using a combination of machine and hand stitching. Moving on, I’d say my response to the Better Lives 2 Lecture on Emerging Technologies strengthened my work and added more variety as I used Photoshop to develop my embroidery sample into fashion visualisations. I now must update my blog site with my responses to the other tasks to create a more extensive body of work fit to pass this brief.

UPDATE TO CRITICAL REVIEW: I think my responses to the last three lectures weren’t as exciting as the first two as the mediums I used were quite simple and not combined with any other technique. I think it would have been a good idea to progress my embroidery sample along by using similar coloured natural fibre yarns (like recycled wool) to create physical garment design ideas on the half scale mannequin in response to the Nature Lecture.