DR ANNIE SHAW

Dr Annie Shaw is a Design Research Centre Leader and Post Grad programmes co-ordinator for Design. Her teaching is mostly linked to Fashion & Textiles and her specialisms are knit/wear, menswear and future-scoping. She also supervises PhD candidates across a broad range of design-related subjects.

I'd heard a lot about Annie and was delighted when she openly invited everyone to come and here her talk about her practise. Annie is extremely interested in sustainability through her work and questions "Why does anybody need more stuff?" She also quoted that it is better to be a Jack of all trades and master of one rather than a Jack of all trades and master of none!

Through her work Annie explores how we inhabit space whether it be a garment, a room, a building or a city perhaps. Her work has taken her through exploring how we inhabit a garment through her knitted pieces and also how this translates into a room that we inhabit with her concrete knitted pillar at the recent exhibition Seamless: the digital in design. The exhibition, which Annie co-ordinated and curated occupied a beautiful space in Ljubljana, Slovenia, showing work produced by Annie's colleagues. Annie says that "New technologies have changed the way design is conceived, developed and fabricated. Digital approaches open up new interdisciplinary networks that enable techniques and materials to migrate from one discipline to another. And as a result design boundaries such as fashion, product, graphics, media and architectural design are re-configuring and specialisms breaking down."

Annie introduced me through her talk to the slow movements which I am aware of perhaps these things taking place around me but had no idea that it was a part of an actual movement. There are several of these movements ranging from slow food, slow cities, slow art to slow travel to name but a few. Each of their intentions is to advocate a cultural shift towards slowing down life's pace. These movements are not organised by one individual, their fundamental characteristics are that the movement is propounded, and it's momentum maintained by individuals who constitute the expanding global community of slow.

A lot of Annie's work looks back at the generic versions of design in fashion the kimono, wellingtons, duffle coats and particularly the gansey. A gansey was a word I had also never come across, I'd have more likely said guernsey! It is a traditional fisherman's jumper which were seamlessly knitted in the round and therefore have no point of weakness. The original occupation of the gansey was for need not fashion Annie states. These ganseys were knitted for a purpose and so were also kept and mended to prolong their use. Annie sees mending as a vocabulary that should be celebrated, it is a mark of their wearer, a history, a narrative.

The sustainability advantages of creating such a garment is that there is no waste whatsoever, there are no seams to sew up once the pieces is finished and through being repaired it lasts for years. Some ganseys can be seen to have extra length in the body and arms added on once the wearer had out grown it's original size. As part of one of Annie's major projects she made 100 ganseys on a Shima Seiki (seamless knitting machine) and treated each one with a different method. Some examples Annie gave were, dyeing the garment, to have them sea washed by putting them out in lobster pots, dipping into latex, attaching 3 of them to a penny hedge and probably her most popular piece, to deep fry one in the chippy, which she also see's as a comment on the fast food industry.

Apparently, many fishermen could not swim, some even filled their pockets up with weights so that whilst they were out at sea they would take no risks what so ever to prevent going over board. If they ever did fall over board then the weights in their pockets would help to pull them down quicker and avoid a slow death.

Many of the places that Annie has exhibited these works at have taken place along the East coast of the Uk following the traditional herring fishing routes.

Annie made many very interesting points in her lecture and introduced me to many things I previously did not know about. It's great to see work that takes things back to basics yet strives to add more of a narrative to something that already has such a history, and then to take these skills and the knowledge to transform the work into something quite unique and has yet to make it's own history and narrative like the knitted concrete pillar pictured here below.