Soft Sculptures

Textile artist Yu-Mei Huang first collaborated with the lab's knitting experts in 2023 on the Soft Sculptures project: sculptural knits that move at the intersection of body art and spatial design. The project is about the interaction between textiles, body and space and breaks through the user-unfriendly and material-wasting system of fixed sizes and shapes.

In the lab, Huang worked on three different designs: an object, a garment and a series of wall hangings. All pieces will be shown in a performance at her solo exhibition in Taiwan and at the London Design Festival in the coming year. The object is a gracefully pleated self-contained structure knitted with polyester monofilament and elastic, creating a sturdy yet highly flexible and resilient construction.

The garment is an our-size-fits-all kimono with three-dimensional pleats. In its development, an innovative ‘plaiting’ technique was used to knit in the challenging colour pattern instead of printing the fabric afterwards, as Huang first intended. For the six knitted wall hangings, innovative techniques were employed to create striking fluttering and distinct textures, patterns and colours.