SEISMIC IDENTITY

Taking color and textural inspiration from geological landforms, this collection explores human identity and its intersection with the natural world. While it has become essential to our current discourse, identity is often reduced to mere adjectives that do not account for the undulations, shifts, and eclecticism that comprise one’s whole self. The collection presents a process by which identity is forged over time: by the gathering and cobbling together of disparate elements from various times and places, by the careful selection of the particular textures we make most prominent in order to convey meaning to others, through frequent destruction and subsequent regathering of fragments that are lost through trauma, and the order, symmetry, and categorization that holds our definitions of selfhood cohesively. In the end, we find that identity is part of the grand human spectacle - a constructed element that moves like the natural world, but is deeply ingrained in the human-centric. 

Completed in 2018

STRUCTURAL ATAXIA

Ataxia is a neurological condition in which one loses voluntary muscle coordination. In the case of gait ataxia, one’s normal walking gait becomes strained and distorted as muscles contract involuntarily.

This collection is representative of such a loss of control in monolithic, omnipresent structures through trauma. Mass production gone awry, brutal forms, the deterioration of order into chaos, and surveillance are explored through the knit structures. Fabrics are rendered in the colors of the sunset, smoke and fire, and the colors of bleakness in the aftermath of destruction: lush greens and sunset tones collide with blazing oranges, ashy grays, and deep blacks to create disparate juxtapositions and harmonious tension. The collection is just as much a response to and natural outgrowth of the current dismal political and socio-cultural moment as it is an exploration of a dystopian view of the future that references mid-century Brutalist architecture.

The collection is made up of various knit structures including links, pointelle, and two-system tubular jacquard with an extensive use of plating as a color effect. All designs were knit on either a 5gg or 10gg Shima Seiki knitting machine, and programmed using APEX3 software. Completed in 2017.