Thomas Heatherwick has a studio in London that has a particular approach to designing buildings. It was in Alison’s class that I learnt about him the first time by watching a TED show. The first word that came up to my mind is “humanity” for the reason that it provides quite convenient experience for the passengers.
Last Friday, we went to London for the research of our second project — sustainable fashion in the future. A number of thought-provoking pictures have been taken and I will show you all of them and the reason why I inspired by those pictures.
Along the road to London on the train, the view of these living and commercial spaces transformed by containers looks stunning for the reason that I was extremely pleased with the reuse way of “buildings”.
Apparently, the wasted steel containers would do no harm to the environment, and also they are not just “crap” but been given values. What’s more, these containers are movable in some. extent, so people don’t have to cut down the trees around there to gain more space for the constructions.
After we arrived in London, we straitly went to the National Gallery for the exhibitions. There’s a large park which contains numerous trees, green grass and lively animals such as squirrels and pigeons near the gallery, not to mention the refreshing air that we took every minutes in there. This is probably as a result of the citizens who paid highly attention to the eco-friendly system.
Joseph Beuys Lightning with Stag in its Glare
Those large installations are from German artists Joseph Beuys, when he returned to working with stone, wood and bronze. All works address themes of finality and death, but also ideas of regeneration through nature.
In my opinion, I was delighted to see the materials that Joseph Beuys chose to use for those installations, which are quite sustainable in some extent. For example, wood and logs are from the nature and it can decay in the soil without any damage to the surface soil. Steel, as well as plastics, grass, and papers ca be recycled and reused.
As I mentioned above, there’s also some masterpieces focusing on the plastics and papers. My favourite one is the first one for the reason that it was made by old newspapers. The newspapers had been settled for many layers, one covered above another and the hole has been on the different layers as you can see, then the newspapers was painted in black and white. To be honest, I didn’t recognised the paper-made artwork, as it looks extremely thick, and I can feel the space between the layers which is vivid and vibrant for me.
The last picture shows that the artists put a number of craps namely as plastic bags, clothes and spring-mattress on a dying tree. It seems like they are companying each other as they are all abandoned and useless for most of the people, and them looks surprisingly in harmony as they were doomed to be together. In the past, I would have felt those things are unnecessary likes other people, but this time I realised there’s nothing useless at all, every detail in our daily life could be sustainable and represent for beauty.
Thank you for reading!
I’ve researched 3 fashion brands which closely connected to the theme of sustainability, i’m going to introduce them all one by one and explain the reasons behind this choice.
EDUN
EDUN is a brand whose aim is to support grassroots in Africa. Its mission has been to source sustainable production and encourage trade in Africa. In my opinion, very few things in fashion are sustainable. But when i saw these fascinating photos of EDUN’s lookbook on Instagram at the first time, i can not deny this is fashion. EDUN has amazingly achieved the goal of being sustainable as a fashionable company.
One of the most attractive works of EDUN is the “Pineapple Bibi Bag” collection. As you can see in the pictures, there are a lot of pineapple trees in Africa, and the rest part of pineapple trees have been wisely reused to create a fancy handbag like that ⬆️.
This slideshow clearly shows the steps of how they process pineapple trees into a bag. The bag is made of faux leather, which is made from pineapple leaf fibers, and the handle of the bag is made from wood, in the end, the lining on the bags are all handwoven cotton.
I was extremely astonished by the story behind the bags, not to mention the idea of doing this collection is absolutly great. As the materials of these are all from local pineapple trees, they don’t have to use another land to land something or causeing any pollution to the land, water, and no fertilizer or chemical pesticides. By adding value to the waste part of pineapple trees, it could not only protect the environment but also provide additional income.
FAUSTINE STEINMETZ
Faustine Steinmetz has established her studio in London. They are mainly focused on Denim, as she found cotton is a good material to create new stuff. She insist make their garments by hand, from hand woven cloth to hand made Swarovski crystal textiles. By doing this, she hold the view that its a kind of sustainability because they don’t use electricity. What’s more, she wants consumers buying less and buying thoughtfully, because making clothes takes a long time and she hopes that clothes would be kept for a long time too.
VIVIENNE WESTWOOD
Vivienne said that “Buy less, choose well, and make it last.” She thinks that it is good for environment as there is more and more evidence of global and man-made climate change. She argue that using less plastics and reduce unnecessary consumption on cloth is friendly to our planet.
Last Wednesday afternoon, we interviewed a few passengers in our society in the Pentagon Shopping Centre, asking people about their opinions upon “Happiness” and “Loneliness”. 🙂🙁
🔸 Living without cancer. / I am living alone. (Anonymous, 60)
🔸 Happiness is a contribution thing among lots of people, it can create on your own.
I have lost my wife when i was 51, but i never feels lonely, because i have a number of friends, who kept me accompany all the time during that period. (Peter, 78)
🔸 There is nothing makes me feel happiness, since the repeated routine is boring, and i lives in Rochester, it is a boring place, it dose not makes me happy.
In addition, i am too old, and people in my age barely think about “Happiness”. (Anonymous, 83)
🔸 I don’t believe in “Happiness”, and we have to struggle for “Happiness”, because it never comes to you. I have been alone for a few years, but i like to be alone. (Dleao, 18)
Looking at these innovative thoughts above, i was really impressed by those answers. In the past, i hold the view that most of the people might simply feels happy during their lives, because we have delicious foods to eat, beautiful scenery to view, entertaining movies to watch and lovely friends to play with. It turns out to be quilt surprising that not all of the people are optimistic towards life as i do, and some of them might suffered from some disaster moment in the past.
On reflection, i am thankful for these informations, which help me a lot on understanding how different ideas relate to different lives.
Our project’s theme is Ageism, and we finally decided to nail down this subject to a more specific one called the gap between generations. The reason why we started with this theme is that we’ve seen a lot of elderly people lives in Margate without the company of their children, and part of them even lives alone in this small town. In the meanwhile, some elderly people who lives in other cities came here for visiting, and the most of them are alone or with their partners because they really enjoy the peaceful seaside scenery and there’s no teenagers would like to go with them.
What’s more, younger generations like children and teenagers remains a large majority, since their innocence and playfulness, but based on our observation, they were just focused on their playing, swimming, etc, they barely talked to elderly people and they wouldn’t join together of activities.
On the one hand, it seems like younger generations don’t care about elderly people’s feeling or what’s happened to their entire lives; on the other hand, some grandparents would worried about how they can communicate with teenagers, and some of them might think that younger generations would dislike them or showing impatience if they even don’t know how to download an application on their mobile phone. They are afraid of communicating with teenagers in some extents, but they want that connection actually.
My name is XiaoWen, you can also call me Inès. I’m graduated from Shanghai Customs College, and my major was Logistics Management. However, now i’m going to start my 5 weeks Pre-sessional English course for Art and Design in Rochester, UCA.
Why do this?
Why i’m here starting this blog is that our tutor asked us to set up our own blog for recording every meaningful moments in our daily life.
agapeart.health.blog 