Morven Mulgrew

What can be better than spending an evening making a costume for yourself from cardboard, and then throwing yourself into battle as your super sumo alter ego?
Morven Mulgrew is a sculptor, performer, and designer based in London and has been running Cardboard Sumo since 2011, in church halls, warehouses, theatre spaces and bus stations. The result is a cacophony of chaotic, creative madness, with impromptu cameos from posturing would be sumo heroes.

"Cardboard Sumo started as a project where I made wearable cardboard sculptural objects and left them around a ring, with no instructions. After a while the audience would try them on, and eventually 2 folk would have a fight, the suits would be destroyed and after the fight I'd repair them with gaffer tape. Once people  had fought in them once, other audience members would become more brave and the suits would be slowly more destroyed until they were unrepairable and there was just a pile of cardboard pieces in the ring. I wanted a project which invited participation in a non patronising way and I also wanted to do something where the audience was encouraged to touch the "art" and destroy it.
Over the years 'Sumo' has evolved into more of a performance, with a compère on a mike (me), music, lighting and a Making station, where the audience can modify or make their own suits. They get an entry song into the ring, and fight each other. It's still about making something participatory that the audience doesn't have to be coerced into participating in. It is supposed to be absurd, funny, destructive and overall a celebration of doing-it-yourself. I try to make the set up of the space as beautiful as I can, and arrange the sumo suits quite formally so that there is care taken to how it looks sculpturally, and as the audience get involved with the suits and by performing, the space becomes messier and messier." Morven Mulgrew

Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich I

Elephants from Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich's event 'Circus Between Worlds' an art event with incredible spectacles of costume, drama and performance that took place in Glasgow last weekend.

"An experimental artists’ circus emerges from the ruins of the iconic Greek Thompson church in Glasgow. Bringing together a maverick group of performers this ad-hoc community conflates absurdism, death metal and the village green to enact a freeform learning environment.

Photography Mark Pinder.

Hiroshi Nomot

Happy Easter
To celebrate here is an Easter Bunny mask by Hiroshi Nomot.

Hiroshi Nomot

Love these fun, surreal ventures of Japanese silversmith Hiroshi Nomot. 

"I want to express the warmhearted sensations of thrill and excitement. The mask is a border between my inner self and outer self. A sense of consciousness connecting and influencing myself.My other self and you arises by wearing the 'MASK'."   Hiroshi Nomot

Annelies Henny and Hannah Sullivan

With Force and Noise (teaser) from hannah on Vimeo.

The images above are from an embroidered costume created in collaboration between performance artist Hannah Sullivan and costume designer Annelies Henny for a performance called 'With Force and Noise'. Hannah has been researching and exploring the emotion 'anger' and has come to understand it as a combination of biological motivation and a socially complex entity.
Anger is an emotion that is bound up with our perceptions of madness and often dismissed but it is a powerful force, a strong often ugly part of  our humanity, too often neglected, behind more socially palatable emotions like fear and love.
Through working with ideas for the costume Hannah found herself suddenly in a world of craft.

"I was led to a world of craft and textile that opened a whole new angle on the emotion of anger. This angle is that anger motivates us to make something visible or witnessed, a possible route for this is what I am calling radical craft." Hannah Sullivan

                                         Image above:Jack Offord

"Hannah came to me with lots of research around anger and we worked together in the studio translating it into a costume, then Hannah did lots of drawing and I translated that into embroidery... " Annelies Henny

George Duan

Sometimes fashion is made by the accessories and I think these shoes by product designer George Duan are fantastic.

"An experimental shoe created using a CNC machine. I wanted to make a wooden sole for a shoe that has a very complex form. I also CNC an aluminum mold for the rubber pad modeling. The wooden sole is a piece maple cut with Tormach." George Duan

Fabrics and how they rot, or not.

I am working on a series of posters about plastic pollution of our beaches, seas and oceans.
I used to like finding fabric items on the beach and if they were attractive enough using them in textile illustrations. They were chance discoveries of someone else's history, a little like archeology and I liked to weave them back into the 'fabric of life' by making them key parts of my work.

However lately, I have been finding a lot of plastic gloves, garments and shoes that are man made and do not biodegrade. As I find greater quantities of them, I am realising the incredible damage that these cheap engineered synthetic fabrics are having on our environment and thus on our water and food.
This is bad enough, but then I find that research is being conducted on the vast amounts of microscopic filaments that these garments release just through being washed which are then ingested along our coasts by sea creatures. These tiny fibers cannot be gathered in a beach clean these are infecting our world at a microscopic level that is impossible to fix.

Solution, don't buy man-made fibers buy organic cotton, linen, flax and wool.
Stop the rot by buying fabrics that do rot.