Wearables: Simplifying
As I struggled with my construction, I realized that I’ve been trying to do too many things with this project. There are so many ideas an experiences that I want to address – but unfortunately, one garment is not capable of that (at least, not yet).
I took all my materials home. I think part of me has felt distracted and overwhelmed by being on the floor at the moment – thesis, finals. There are high levels of stress and anxiety, including within my own body.
As I draped the fabric over me again, the fleece, the black out cloth, I returned to one of my earliest feelings. The idea of overstimulation.
I think the need for space, for personal space, comes from being overwhelmed – by people, by the urban environment, by our own feelings. I think this was the feeling I was trying to address the most. How to create a quiet world for one’s self.
And I can see how my other thoughts tie into this – a need for privacy, to be left alone, a quiet place to collect one’s thoughts and emotions. Where one feels safe and secure. I think that’s why I kept thinking of it as a personal fort – because as a child, forts were a place that I constructed to escape. To hide.
…now, where I’m still struggling is the exterior experience. Going in this direction, I’m trying to think of visual and architectural references that say, keep away, don’t disturb. Porcupine spikes? A snail shell? I’m not interested in true camouflage – I think that even when we try and hide we leave some kind of mark, that we don’t want to truly disappear. It’s more that we want to be left alone. I’m still attached to this “personal space suit” idea, that space suits are themselves a small spacecraft, a habitable space and technology that allows a person to exist in hostile environments. (would making the architectural form look more like a space shuttle be too on the nose?)
(Stefani mentioned that Mary Mattingly did a wearable portable architecture project to talk about survivalism. Does make me wonder if the design should have more than two stages.)