Roots and Water
My piece called Roots and Water was inspired by the organic over growth of roots in the hiking trails of Hawaii. I was hiking one day in Manoa and I took a picture of this beautiful entanglement of roots that looked so effortless in it’s creation. I thought of the process that took to create such an elegant design and how root had a purpose in making the structure stable and strong. So when the famous textile artist Akihiko Izukura donated raw silk to our department and introduced this interesting idea of “Zero Waste”. Where every single strand of fabric is used in created the garment I felt that it tied in to my inspiration perfectly.
We started out taking a workshop with Izukura where he taught us how to created natural dyes and different ways of dying our raw silk. Much of the materials that were used in the dye could be found in Hawaii. We created dyes from ginger root, turmeric, red dirt and lipstick berries. For my piece I used lipstick berries and ginger root. After the dying process we laid out fabric in the sun for the color to set. There was a bit of fading, however, it did introduce a nice shade that I really liked.
After the color was set I stripped the fabric into an inch wide strand where I basted the fabric strips on each other to and started to let my garment grow on the dress form. I had no clear intention of how my garment was going to turn out, however, I just let the fabric speak and grow looking at it’s different color tones to see where each fabric strip would be placed.
