Digitally printed & laser etched velveteen!

Here are some photos of experiments I have done with combining digital textile printing with laser etching on velvet. So many possibilities!

Before washing:

After washing: (colour change is due to bad photography, not change in fabric colour)

With some digital embroidery:

Textile Design Lab at AUT, New Zealand

This video talks about the Textile Design Laboratory, where I will be heading at the end of next week to teach two master classes and speak at a Digital Textile Printing symposium:
TVNZ's video feature on "Fighting Parallel Imported Fashion Tide"

This is a link to their website:
TDL at Auckland University of Technology

What I should have posted before... Previous artwork

"Summer"
This was a collaborative piece with Jean Parsons and Susan Strawn. There are two layers of digitally printed silk; silk broadcloth below, silk gauze above. The transparency of the gauze creates an amplification effect with the imagery. Susan cut extra digitally printed silk into strips and created the knitted hood, cuffs and hemline.

This is a print section from a design I called "Overload"

These two are called "Transformation: Icarus (I and II)" and they were collaboratively designed with Jean Parsons. One is printed on wool gabardine, the other on silk habotai.

This piece is called "I still can't find it; the right colour"

"Moving Through" is a rectangle with a tube going from one side to the other. It can be worn as a tube dress or hung as a 2D piece.

Work that I should have posted before.... "Wearing this distorted space"

In 2005 I created this mock-up piece for the "Digital Perceptions" exhibition at the Collins Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland. What I wanted to be able to do was create an engineered print in a jacket that was part of a fabric wall.

In 2007, I continued the idea for the "New Craft Future Voices" conference in Dundee to create the piece called "Wearing this distorted space". I first took photographs of the gallery space where I would be displaying the work. Then I used the photos as a backdrop for the imagery that I was creating to fill into the jacket, so that it would create a trompe l'oiel effect when exhibited. When I installed the piece, I created two planes of fabric that were stretched into a cove in the Cooper Gallery. The photo below shows the background panel which was not actually visible once the entire work was installed. I used one of the photos of the gallery and distorted it, leaving in some random artwork and a table as part of the image.

Then I installed another panel in front of the previous one, concealing it completely. The front panel had the jacket integrated into the composition so that the imagery continues across all of the seamlines. Below is a shot during the installation process.

Here's a detail of the jacket.

This shows the 'floatiing' composition that I hung in the middle of my re-representation of the gallery.

Once it was completely installed, I used two digital cameras and two LCD projectors to create the final effect with the piece. One camera was capturing live imagery from the front panel and projecting it onto a section of the back panel. Another camera was capturing what was being projected onto the back panel and re-projecting it out onto an adjacent wall in front of the piece.

When a person would try on the garment, at first they would think that they are just seeing a projected image of themselves on the adjacent wall, but if they looked closely, they would realise that the projection on the wall did not match the imagery of the fabric panel they were in (it had the table, etc. from the back panel as well). In this way, I was trying to communicate the connection and disconnection that we have to our environments when we aren't clear about what we want from digital technologies.

Ant Kimono - the continuous path

This kimono design will be printed out tonight on silk crepe de chine. It is being used to help demonstrate the possibilities that we are developing with our 'kimono generator' concept, pioneered at the Centre for Advanced Textiles (www.centreforadvancedtextiles.com).