Summer School Exhibition

For the past two weeks, I've been teaching fashion & textile design to some very cool kids at summer school. Last night they had their graduation and exhibition to show off their work.

 The summer school was held at UTS for year 11 students from priority funded schools. I was amazed at the creativity and talent these kids showed across three areas of design - fashion, visual communication and industrial design. They spent two days learning about each of these disciplines before choosing one to concentrate on for a second project. 

The first project for fashion design was screen printing. The students designed paper stencils and printed on t-shirts and bags. It's a tricky technique to perfect but they picked it up very quickly.

Two awesome examples of making your mistakes work for you. When the girl doing the Patrick t-shirt forgot to put the whites of his eyes in, she painted on some sunglasses. When the text on the Mickey Mouse t-shirt bled, the designer grabbed a paintbrush and roughed it up to make it look more purposeful. I thought her t-shirt had a very 'street art' feel to it, with the black stencil and fluoro orange 'LOVE'.

The second project concentrated on transforming recycled junk into sculptural fashion pieces (it was all very Project Runway!). This dress was a tribute to obsolete technology, using cut up CDs, video tape and a necklace made from broken headphones.

 

Wrapping paper, laser-cutting offcuts, vinyl, and pink safety pins.

Top made from woven strips of garden tarpaulin and an inflatable cactus party decoration. Skirt made from paper, fake flowers and green cable ties.

The industrial design workshops revolved around making lamps, displayed here in front of visual communication's posters.

For their second project, industrial design worked as a group to turn the sample prints and sketches from all of the first three workshops into a beautiful mobile.