Textiles in Practice: Reflections on Origins

Shelter Project

Locating Resit

For my Locating unit resit, I was inspired for my shelter to link to something current that could be of help in the world right now. During the pandemic the death of George Floyd, sparked outrage around the world and started the Black lived matter movement. In order to raise awareness to black culture and their textile artists designers and rich historical culture; I decided to base my designs on a harsher part of the world, In Kenya specifically Burkina Faso, and became intrigued by a town there called Tiebele.

Tiebele is famous for its sukhala or colorful windowless traditional houses. It is inhabited by people of Kassena, who first settled the region in the 15th century, and are the oldest ethnic group in Burkina Faso.

The UK currently has around 1.9 million African-British citizens, and around 23% of migrants from Africa migrate to Europe. With Africa corrupt government, poverty and famine there are many reasons for African to want to migrate from their homes.

I decided that I would like to create a design of shelter which could be built in the UK to house the immigrants as a steppingstone to a new culture and society. So much so I wanted my shelter to consist of it own community much like the Tiebele and have different structures naturally forming together. And by keeping design elements similar and fluid it would promote a smooth transition for such asylum seekers to feel safe and at home.

For my designs it was harder to find primary resources due a lot of places being closed so I found a lot of my resources online on websites, museum archives, art gallery archives and books. One very resourceful site for finding great inspiration was the Smithsonian national museum of African art. Here I found lots of traditional masks, clothing and textiles which are relevant to African history.

I also found some great inspirational African designers which inspired my designs such as
Alexander "Skunder" Boghossian (1937-2003, born Ethiopia), this painting heavily inspiring my colour palette as well as Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, his layering of textures and prints was very refreshing.

I also enjoyed the bold and bright simplistic colourful prints from the African run fashion brand Banke Kuku and similarly another black owned brand Zuri.

I was also inspired by Shelia Bridges Designs Wallpapers, which were bold but with an old renaissance African twist.

For my design I wanted to keep it simple with as few of lines as possible. I felt like this accurately represented African design. Bold yet simple patterns repeated without too much attention to detail. For my audience for the shelter I felt it was important to make it family friendly and such a ‘child like’ design would be appealing for a family and make a already hard that bit more exciting.

I wanted to keep the designs as random as possible to follow suite with the unique design of the Tiebele village. Focusing on more spread out and bold designs for the exterior of the buildings, to help better blend with the surroundings. And more intricate designs for the interior of the shelters, to help give a cosier and ‘homey’ vibe. It was important to have contrasting patterns next to one another as I feel this is an inherent African art staple.

The first designs I did were purposed for the exterior of the huts and I wanted these to be primarily more simple, abstract and blown out designs. I felt like this could help the huts blend into the surrounding abit better and would give a better 'shock value' once you entered inside the huts to see the more intricate designs. I tried to stick to more neutral and warm earthy tone of colours, because this best suits the original habitat from which these huts come from. Most of these designs are inspired from a book I purchased African Textiles: Colour and Creativity Across a Continent: Color and Creativity Across a Continent by John Gillow. It really gave me a sense of what African textiles is all about.

For my first Idea I decided to explore the placement of of stripes to make something similar to that of a african weave.

I then decided to explore with some more abstract shapes and use the left over space to create more motifs.

I feel this created effective and unexpected lively motifs which later on became useful for added texture and backgrounds. However at this point and did not have a specific colour pallet in mind.

I then decided to further explore colour pulling my inspiration from various african artists paintings, designs and photography.

So far I really liked the colour combinations but felt that the clay homes are almost an extension of the earth the bright colours would bit abit overbearing on the rest of the design.

In the end of decided to settle on these colours as they were more earth toned, but still had a few pops of colour and I felt they all worked in harmony together. The more neutral warm tones could be used for the exterior of the shelter and the pops of colour for the inside.

Looking through my book and at some historical and more recent research, triangles, chevron and checkerboard are all very common african designs, so I decided to take my own spin on them.

Now inspired by more intricate details of african masks and and old antiques I start to create some more interesting motifs.

(African dying techniques)

With tye dye and forms of resist printing such as batik being quite popular with African design, I tried to recreate an example of resist painting for a similar effect using a crayon and watercolour paint over the top.

Overall I am pleased with the way they turned out considering they were achieved on paper, and I like the rustic and old age effect that the combination brings.