Category: Interviews and features

Back to the Breast with Carina Hardy

If you were around the Goldsmiths campus one particular sunny Friday this year in May, you couldn’t have failed to notice a pair of giant, inflatable breasts adorning our College green. Interested visitors could even crawl inside through an underwire, and see the sun through giant a nipple ceiling! The eye-catching installation is the work of Carina Hardy, a student of Barnard College (New York) who spent one year in the Design department at Goldsmiths. The giant boobs have travelled far before they arrived to Goldsmiths, since they were built in Bali and previously exhibited at Wonderfruit festival in Thailand. But why inflatable breasts, and what does it all mean? Carina explains:

How the breasts were made

This project posed some extreme challenges because I was committed to make them entirely out of sustainable materials. The ultimate goal was to compost them at the end of their life. After a series of material tests and prototypes we built the membrane structure out of organic cotton and coated the fabric in natural latex. I built them in Bali, where I was raised, with the help of a master tailor and a team. The natural liquid latex is hand-painted onto a total of 64 panels, and we pigmented the canvas because I didn’t want the default to be white breasts – watching the pigment change over time has been really interesting as well. It was a very intense material to figure out because it’s so sticky. The latex had to be brushed with baby powder so that it wouldn’t stick to itself. Continue reading “Back to the Breast with Carina Hardy”

Innovative design work at the 2017 Goldsmiths Design Festival

Last week, the Goldsmiths Design Festival held its third edition, again as part of the London Design Festival. As in the previous year, events took place in a single location, at the St James Hatcham gallery in New Cross. A private industry view for the postgraduate show happened on the evening of September 14th, while family and friends were welcomed on the evening of 15 September; the exhibition remained open until 17 September. All events were free to attend, and drinks were once again provided by The Fat Walrus.

From turning a parachute into fashion to exploring Mukbang, the online trend of broadcasting meals, from investigating different perceptions on human rights to empowering local communities through market hubs, the 2017 MA Show offered a wide range of exciting work. A few of the projects will be featured on the blog soon, so watch this space! You can also find more photos of the exhibits and the opening evening on our Facebook page. Continue reading “Innovative design work at the 2017 Goldsmiths Design Festival”

HYPHEN show 2017: Eleanor Price brings cross stitch to a new audience

Embroidery and cross stitch are usually associated with femininity, and seen as less sophisticated than other crafts. A keen cross stitcher herself, Eleanor Price is challenging these perceptions through her graduation project for the BA Design course at Goldsmiths:

“I’m looking at embroidery and how it could reach a wider audience. I’ve been using cross stitch to make house plans, using the femininity of shapes, and the skill, on something that’s seen as more neutral. And I’ve been building extensions on the houses, as a fancy element of decorating a house. I started by trying to think of things that were already shown through cross stitch imagery, and house imagery is one of them, but it very much consists of idealised cottages and wooden houses in the mountains. It’s a kind of fantasy that I don’t feel many people have anymore. So I started looking at more achievable fantasies that you could work towards, and that everyone could relate to- and house extensions is one of them. ” Continue reading “HYPHEN show 2017: Eleanor Price brings cross stitch to a new audience”