yesterday was a successful day at NUCA –i held a presentation and ran a seminar with Year 2 Surface Design around the assessment criteria in the morning and the afternoon centred around tutorials exploring the new report that takes the place of the thesis - I have spent the day creating a number of bookworks using folding sheet material that I had layered up and laminated during the week. i have been creating experimental structures in miniature that are quite formal and highly structured but the use of the constructed material to build the work has led to accepting and then celebrating the qualities of the material. so the structures sag and bend affirming their materiality – i was reminded of the idea of wabi-sabi found in the Japanese fashion exhibition at the barbican at the moment.
‘From an engineering or design point of view, "wabi" may be interpreted as the imperfect quality of any object, due to inevitable limitations in design and construction/manufacture especially with respect to unpredictable or changing usage conditions; then "sabi" could be interpreted as the aspect of imperfect reliability, or limited mortality of any object, hence the etymological connection with the Japanese word sabi, to rust.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
