Wilderness

Past meets present in Laura Baruël’s dress sculptures.

Fashion and textile designer Laura Barüel takes her cue from the relation between modern man and nature and is inspired by the physical and geographical place – nature, landscape, climate, light and colours. Based on an interest in the Nordic, the idea is to further explore and visualise the relations between man, garment and place.

The exhibition revolves around the idea of primitive man’s basic need for protection of the body, and the subsequent desire to express oneself through bodily adornment. Laura Baruël has gathered organic material for the project that reflects Nordic nature with the changing of the seasons. The vegetable fibres have been ‘frozen’ in their present state using preservative liquids, which penetrate the cells and conserve the flexibility of the fibres. They are used as elements in the robes, and to Laura Baruël they symbolize a kind of primary language, coloured by the impenetrability of the forest as part of the pre-historic Nordic landscape.

But we are far from ‘back to the stone age’ because Laura Baruël is a contemporary fashion designer, and she herself perceives her dress sculptures as visions of the future. While being inspired by an understanding of the life styles and rites of a distant past, Laura Baruël utilizes modern textile and artificial fibres, and a mixture of classical and experimenting techniques to express her own very special feminine imaginary world. The plant fibres are sewn into a specific pattern on a polyester-net, larger or smaller areas are cut out and the different elements are draped directly onto the dressmaker’s dummy. The shapes of the fibres help determine the position and direction of the material.

The style mixes inspiration from ancient fertility sculptures and from the more experimental part of international fashion design, stimulated by an apprenticeship in Tokyo with the Japanese fashion designer Yoshiko Hishinuma, who works mainly with pleats and traditional Japanese printing techniques.

The exhibition is open from 16 February to 8 April 2007

Last updated 08.12.2010