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Dress grown from plant roots 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySuzQ5TE3Eo
The exhibition tells this story through dress and accessories drawn from the V&A’s collection and loans from leading designers such as Stella McCartney, Giles Deacon and Ermenegildo Zegna. Natural history specimens, taxidermy, film and images add context. A specially commissioned soundscape brings nature into the exhibition space in another way gradually merging birdsong with the sounds of machinery to suggest the increasing impact of human activity as technology advanced and the population grew.
Throughout, Fashioned from Nature highlights the role of campaigners in raising awareness of the negative impact of fashion, from the founding members of the Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds to Katharine Hamnett and Vivienne Westwood. Importantly, it focuses on solutions and draws attention to the exciting interdisciplinary research taking place today which is driving the development of cleaner, less wasteful processes and materials.
At a time when environmental protection and the use and disposal of precious resources are hotly debated topics, the exhibition provides a forum for discussion. Fashioned from Nature asks what we can learn from the past in order to design a better fashion industry for the future. It not only challenges designers to create clothes that are both beautiful and responsible, but also encourages us all to consider more carefully our own clothes.
Written by Edwina Ehrman, Senior Curator of Fashioned from Nature
Fashioned from Nature opens 21 April 2018.
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The Nature Lab at RISD is pleased to announce Biodesign: From Inspiration to Integration, an exhibition curated in collaboration with William Myers that marks the culmination of our 80th anniversary celebrations. The exhibition runs from Aug 25—Sept 27 and showcases recent examples of design and art that inform our complex relationship with nature and help us decipher how it may evolve in the future. Located at the Woods Gerry Gallery, the show is free and open to the public.
To launch the exhibition, we hosted a half-day symposium that brought together international artists, designers, scientists and educators for talks, discussions and presentations on topics such as valuing non-human forms of life as collaborators, artistic and scientific modes of inquiry, and ethical considerations in bioart and biodesign practices.
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Interview with Caroline Roux about growing a dress from plant roots, which features in the Victoria & Albert Museum ‘Fashionioned from Nature’ exhibition.
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The HORTITECTURE 03 Symposium is the third of a series of public lectures, focusing on alternative sustainable building strategies that explore the synergies combining architecture and plant material.
How are plants integrated within the building system?
What kinds of benefits can a new kind of nature-artifact combination offer?
How do the plantings affect the overall environment and architectural design?
What is the maintenance factor and how scalable are these new solutions?
In studying the intersections between architectural, horticultural and technological practices, our goal is to transfer knowledge beyond building design to a larger urban scope, creating better, more sustainable future cities.
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Van Zoetendaal & The Collection
20 May- 3 September
Exercising his expert eye for the beauties of photography, guest curator Willem van Zoetendaal will introduce us to over 200 photographs from the Collection in their original form: that is, directly printed from the negatives. Many of the photographs in the exhibition are well-known in cropped versions but are now being shown for the first time in their entirety. Van Zoetendaal demonstrates that a great deal of information about the photographer’s vision and approach can lie in precisely those apparently insignificant and casual details that cropping tends to eliminate.
Van Zoetendaal will reveal the continuing relevance of the photographs in the museum collection by complementing them with contemporary photographs. The combination produces unexpected links and parallels between past and present. For example, the fact that photographers – then as now – were attracted by motifs like solitary trees, moonlight or reflections in water.
Participating photographers
From the Collection: Katharina Eleonore Behrend, Paul Citroen, Cobie Douma, Bernard F. Eilers, Wally Elenbaas, Ed van der Elsken, Kees Hana, Esther Kroon, Cas Oorthuys, Frits J. Rotgans, Paul Schuitema, Paul Steenhuizen, Richard Tepe and Piet Zwart.
Contemporary photographers: Céline van Balen, Ruth van Beek, Holger Niehaus, Arjan de Nooy, Diana Scherer, Otto Snoek and Harold Strak.