RECYCLING and EXPRESSION

Representing the best woven pieces created by a group of students from the Textile Art Workshop at the School of Art No. 2, Madrid, studying Fashion Design, under the tutelage of the workshop's instructor, Paco Chamorro, this annual educational project,  which combines textile art with the reuse of discarded material,  was first introduced in the 1997 academic year.

The direction taken by the experiential work outlined in these haute lisse loom creations for educational purposes leads to a manifest: there are new possibilities  for textile design, including the application of some of the aesthetic concepts of current art, in particular the use of recycled material and abstraction.  Recycling is understood here as the act of putting a used material through a process in order to be able to  use it again.  These fabrics display the expressive strengths brought out when an object or a part of said object is used in a context other than the one it comes from.

All the work displayed is based on recycling, with a very wide repertoire ranging from discarded traditional textile material, articles of clothing or manufactured cloth (wool, cotton, linen, etc.), to objects taken directly from nature, (shells, berries, leaves, feathers, etc.), to products from the industry (plastics, synthetic fibers, wires, washers, video tape, etc.), intended as textiles or able to be adapted to this use.  In addition,  worthy of note is the multiplicity of accessories made from material coming from everyday objects, (containers, packages, fastenings, etc.).

The method seeks to demonstrate the possibilities presented by this experiment for other fields, such as in fashion design- another trade taught at the School for Applied Arts- and in any other field (stage design, textile architecture, furniture design, interior design and sculpture) using processes similar to those followed in textile design.

Click here to see a virtual gallery of the projects.