Category: Postgraduate

The Textiles workshop at Goldsmiths Design has recently been renovated, and this week, our first class of MA Fashion students were introduced to some of the equipment in the workshop by Textiles lecturer Rose Sinclair. One of the tools that the students got to see at work was the embroidery machine, which transforms a digital design into stitches on fabric.

Continue reading “MA Fashion students in the Textiles lab”

Niusia Winczewski is a part-time student on Goldsmiths’s MA course in Design and Environment; this September, her project “Fox Diner”, which encourages Londoners to share their scrap food with urban foxes, was exhibited at the Goldsmiths Design MA show “TILT”. Urban foxes are a familiar presence to us, but they also tend to cause controversy. How can we learn to share our space with them? Niusia answered a few questions about her project and her take on the issue: 

Q: How did you arrive to the idea of your Fox Diner project?

A: Having moved to London around 2 years ago, I initially did not believe that there were foxes living here, as it took me a good year to finally spot one. One night, cycling back home, a shadow crossed my path, quickly acknowledged my presence and returned back to his secretive world. Jean-Christophe Bailly’s essay, The Animal Side, describes these chance encounters with wild animals as instances where we touch some part of their world. However centuries of human development and civilization now seems irreversible and have drastically minimized these shared spaces. Back home in South Africa, I have this latent fear of protected nature reserves becoming the last “vestiges of a world about to dissappear” as global policies of infinite growth with finite resources hurtle forward. So in a localized context, the Fox Diner aims to reclaim a communal space for humans and animals to overlap, where instead of discarding food on the ground (as one often sees on the streets of London), passersby can read a menu of food that foxes enjoy eating and share it with them, and in so doing, learn something about another species, and help to sustain it. That is in essence is what sustainability entails: the sustenance of life. Continue reading “Niusia Winczewski on urban foxes”