2022 Brief: 'The New Nature'

Brief Context

The 2022 Hand & Lock brief wants you to take inspiration from the power of nature. Evolution, adaption, biomimicry, texture, colour, craft and sustainable practices.

Be innovative and imagine a future where humans learn from nature to live in harmony with nature.

The Brief

There is now an increasing responsibility and expectation for consumers to consider safeguarding the environment and to make more informed and ethical decisions when buying. The textile industry impacts the environment through pesticides and herbicides used in growing cotton, emissions of greenhouse gases and the use, and pollution, of water. This brief is asking you to imagine a future where sustainable materials and innovative nature-inspired textiles can reduce our negative impact on the planet.

Intuit the future of embroidery whilst reflecting on the power of nature to adapt. Consider Biomimicry ‘a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges’.

Reconsider how colour exists in nature and explore how artists have interpreted and altered the way we see the natural world.

Apply your own cultural lens, allowing colour to lead your design. Consider colour as it is observed, or hyper real; saturated, exuberant or abstracted. Natural colours have the potential to be mood enhancing and uplifting whilst supporting the new focus on well-being. Exploit muted, ethereal, blurred, filtered, manipulated, or transforming colours. For references see Viewpoint: Colour, Ephemeral Colour Botanical Gothic and Unseen Colour, for the work of artist Ann Eder exploring combined chemical and digital processes from nature and Craig P. Burrows’ photographic studies of fluorescence in plants.

Conduct your research through exploratory drawing, digitally experimentation and recreating natural tactile surfaces through your choice of materials and techniques. Above all, your design should demonstrate innovation inspired by nature and your own unique vision of a more sustainable future.