The Bauhaus Project

   The Bauhaus Project involved picking two specialist subjects, then developing and creating a final piece for both within 7 weeks. The two subjects I picked were Fashion/Textiles and Fine Art.  My initial inspiration for my textiles garment was Marcel Breuer and his tubular steel chairs, since I loved the way the seat could be suspended in mid-air with the minimum support. However, in the end I decided to use a cube for both projects since, although I knew it would be difficult, I was intrigued by the properties of a cube.

       

My first idea for my cube textiles garment was to use a corner of a cube as my skirt and have two fans as my bodice. However, I found after making a prototype of this garment (see ‘My Corner Cube Dress’) that it did not fit appropriately as a skirt and the fans for the bodice were too flimsy.

 

My solution to these problems was to make a square based pyramid dress which wrapped around the body better. I made it out of Poly Cotton since it is tougher and more flowing than paper, and covered it with different sized paper cubes. For the bodice I made two paper aeroplanes and then folded them out and planned to attach them to the skirt. I then had another problem that this alone was too revealing, therefore I made a separate boob tube made out of poly cotton and attached my aeroplanes to it. This worked well and I was very pleased with the results

For Fine Art we looked at the Triadic Ballet by Oscar Schlemmar, and then began to look at how we could create our own geometric Bauhaus styled costumes for a shadow screen performance.

We also had to make two massive design sheets on parcel paper, exploring our ideas for the performance.

      

I continued with the idea of the cube in my Fine Art project and began to look further into different ways of using it. My final piece was strongly based on the idea of concealment (like a cage) within the cube and then breaking out of the box. I then started to think about how I could create the cage I would be breaking out of and the dance sequence I would use. After explaining my idea I discussed using wings which would represent freedom. I wanted the wings to be translucent, I was originally going to make these out of tissue or tracing paper, but found this was too delicate. After looking at Rebecca Horn’s work I decided to create my wings using 5 triangles cut out of muslin and then sew them together to make a quarter of a circle. I then decided for my Shadow Screen to make a half cube rather than a whole cube so that when viewed from the side, it looks as if it has split in half, setting me free.