Laura Hollis – 3rd Year Glass – Project 4 Design Brief - Existance

This project aims to explore the world of fashion whilst taking a back seat to a certain extent within a design process or collaboration e.g. my work being a background commodity as opposed to being at the forefront of an audiences mind.

I was approached by six fashion students. They would like to incorporate an accessory specifically made from glass that they can use to unify their body of work for a winter fashion collection.

They would additionally like a piece of glass to incorporate within a photo-shoot to highlight the use of glass in some of the collection and to successfully represent their separate inspiration subjects.  

Part of the collaborates design brief includes a requirement for my designs to incorporate a mixture of the individual designers chosen inspiration areas providing me with a whole array of material to focus on. These subjects include:

·         Curiosity of the Mind – man’s relationship with nature.

·         Cellular Patterns/patterns in nature.

·         Stained Glass.

·         Artefacts/Collections – & the potential stories they hold.

·         Spider Webs.

However the accessories are different in that they are purely aesthetic to a so the main inspiration here is in the shapes used historically and also the groups chosen colour palette too.

I aim to create a series of solid hand-cast buttons for specific clothing items and potentially jewellery pieces or ‘beads’ which could be universally used or alternatively be incorporated into a removable accessory for a garment.

This should provide me with a knowledge base for potential future commissions in a separate field to my usual way of working with glass as a material.

Additionally for the main design which is to be used within a photo-shoot I wish to design and build a photographic backdrop using a mixture of contemporary screen-printed glass plus traditional leading techniques.

This should enable me to further develop my technical skills in silk-screening onto glass and knowledge into the structural properties of making a large-scale leaded panel. It also provides with a new set of architectural challenges here with regards to practical stability and the type of physical construction used to create and display this kind of an item.