Freya Whitaker

"I encourage you to look at our world differently, I ask you to ask if there is a possibility that there is another world, an alternative to this one. I ask you to ask yourself: 'Have these situations already played out?' I ask you to see what I see, to look at the world through someone else's eyes, to listen with someone else's ears. What if this world is just as disorderly as our own but in a new direction? Through my practice, I ask the viewer to eliminate overthinking and complexity to access your inner imagination that may long be forgotten."  Freya Whitaker 

A giant mask with fractual lenses was part of Freya Whitaker's degree show encouraging you to step inside and see the world from a different point of view.

Costume and puppetry

Above: 'Rhino' by Megan Tetlow Walker, Below: 'Spider' by Hannah Myers.

 Above and Below: Spider from James and The Giant Peach by Hannah Myers.

Above: James by Lydia Boagey, Below: Aunt Spiker by Charlotte Livingston.

          

 Above: Natascha Allan

The first years of Edinburgh College of Art's performance costume students were given a brief to create puppets and coordinating puppeteers lycra costumes and head pieces, the results were magical. The Lycra body suits were created using dye and print techniques. Millinery skills and fabric manipulation in the head pieces and the technically accomplished puppets.  

Zoe Frewin

Continuing with a glam rock theme is the work of Zoe Frewin, 'Man Enough to be a Woman', for her Performance Costume graduate collection for Edinburgh College of Art.

"In an adaptation of Jayne County’s autobiography ,I present a musical showcasing the life of the first transexual rock icon, an artist who inspired many. We embark on the rock and roll transexual journey of Wayne becoming Jayne and the search for her true identity. The musical takes off in New York at the start of her career, in the late 1960s, and follows her troubled road to stardom." Zoe Frewin

Chloe Myrants-Wilson

Chloe Myrants-Wilson's graduate collection is a glam rock riot of texture and colour, shimmering with light reflective and absorbent fabrics. Chloe has just graduated from Nottingham Trent University School of Art and Design.

Katie Harris-MacLeod

‘Machlag’"Machlag means womb in Scottish Gaelic. A word of intrigue within my practice. Life, as represented by nature, is a constant, self-repeating cycle. Through birth [maiden], life [mother] and death [crone] a woman comes to understand her place within the world. From personal aspects of my own life I am able to interpret this cycle into three different but concurrent stages - Loss, acceptance and rebirth. My work is based on this cycle. As a woman I feel through loss, my connection to nature is omnipresent. I am able to learn and accept its process, through personal exposure to the natural world. This body of work conveys collations of family narratives, repetition and a poetic dialogue between multiple generations.
I have chosen, predominantly, to use [sheep] wool as it is bio-regional to Scotland, ecologically sustainable, generally underused and in absolute abundance, coming from my families farm on the West Coast of Scotland. Wool represents protection, warmth, versatility and life. It is a beautiful natural fibre, which can be used to create a vast array of commodities. It is symbolic of meaning and true to its origins of nomadic culture. Using wool to create a material such as felt dismisses the traditional role of the artist as painter or sculptor. Felt being traditionally a ‘female’ material allows one to recognise a medium which suitably reflects my situation and its relation to the body; it is vulnerable and fragile. It has an earthy heaviness and an ethereal lightness of which allows for poetic and playful concepts behind the use of the material. With its anatomical associations, it is skin like; in the way, it takes form, with gravity, stress, balance and kinaesthetic sense.
The concept behind creating large spherical felt sculptures is that these forms are translated into something that is also female; the womb. Felt is compared to that of a womb because of its ability to absorb, to insulate, to protect and to mute. It is a symbol of life and it is literally a living piece of nature. These, then womb like sculptures are translated back to a woman’s innate connection with the earth and using a material which ‘she’ continues to provide. These sculptures symbolise a progressive tide of memories and emotions, built up over the space of life, maiden/mother/crone; a space in which one can be reborn. The outside world is muffled by the thick dark walls of the womb, reminiscent of being underwater. Silence. Embodying a narrative journey of loss, abandonment and the continuous search for a space that is sacred, safe, the mother/the father, her, woman, she, our innate [human] desire and need for protection. This narrative is then recorded through, a poetic dialogue between the artist, landscape, performance and practice of the wild, [soft] sculpture, photography, sonic art and a collation of artists books and limited editions." Katie Harris-MacLeod

For me Katies work recalled Iranian shepherds from the 1950's who wore amazing felted fleece capes (see below).

As well as the work of the incredible Magdalena Abakanowicz, who I have just found out sadly died on the 20th of April this year (examples of her work below).

Yan Smiley II

                                     Above: photograph by Gareth Easton

Yan Smiley's: 'A Voiceless Vault of Blue' (Above) and 'King' (Below) graduate performance costumes. 

'A Voiceless Vault of Blue', is a self devised sci-fi ballet set on a Scottish Loch side in 1670. The design takes inspiration from Scottish poetry, restrictions and warped perceptions of life within mirrored stained glass. 

" The album 'King' by Fleshgod Apocalypse, takes barbaric manipulations from a 19th century court to reflect on the poisonous nature of contemporary society, with the King representing honour and good within us all 

Above and below: Photograph of detail by Yan Smiley

Isobel Keeys

Isobel Keeys graduate collection for Performance Costume at ECA was created for Slade House by David Mitchell. The performance of this part of the show was incredibly eerie but also stunningly beautiful. 

"I took inspiration from the ‘still space’ that the twins are suspended in. it’s a place where they are both dead and alive simultaneously. I wanted to play on the idea of distorted reality as well as comparing the state that the twins are in, to pressed flowers.

                            Above: Detail by Torya Winters 

I also wanted to compare the fact that the flowers are being preserved in what resembles their alive state while actually being dead. I think this relates to what the twins have created perfectly.In the book, the author hints that colour is the hardest thing for the twins to maintain when projecting the world into the minds of their pray, so I used that idea of drained colour as my colour pallet. I wanted to only have accent hints of colour in the costumes; playing on the idea that things maybe aren’t quite what they seem, and that by adding small amounts of accent colour you brain would maybe fill in the blanks." Isobel Keeys

All images above: Hazel Terry.