On “Medium”

The collection I presented at Hyères came to live about one year ago. During this time I got very inspired by the work of German artist Thomas Demand. He recreates objects and scenes out of everyday life into paper, like kitchens, elevators, empty offices and bathrooms and then photographs them. As a viewer you see the picture and notice something is off, but only after close inspection you realize it’s fake, made out of paper. It is not a vacuum cleaner you’re looking at, you’re looking at a recreation of a vacuum cleaner. He really plays with your interpretation of reality.

At the same time, I saw a sketch from the Armando Iannucci show, that illustrates the same idea. I like the fact, that in both cases paper is used as a “Medium” to lay bare the artificiality of everyday life. Also, as a designer, you work with paper all the time. You use it to put down your ideas, you sketch on it, you draw on it, you make and cut your patterns out of it.
Then I started thinking how I could translate and push the idea of paper into the garments. That turned out to be quite challenging. I tried to treat the fabric as if it would be real paper by manually pleating, cutting and folding the fabric, and drawing on it. I applied folding techniques found in Japanese origamic architecture. That way unusual shapes emerged without ever having had the intention to create sculptural pieces. Paper allowed me to do all kinds of prints, like the blue lines you find in notebooks, blots of ink on blotting paper and also the crude first strokes in children’s drawings.

In short, my collection is about paper as a medium. By introducing impurities and by making classical pieces, like blazers, parkas, shirts and dresses slightly off, I tried again to hint at the idea of representation and artificiality.

Alexandra Verschueren 2010