David Hockney with the soul of the sixties.

Put 10 passionate creatives in the same exhibition and you will get 10 different versions of David Hockney. You may think, "what a nightmare". Yes its exactly just that. 

David Hockney as an inspiration was actually given to us. At the time, his 80 years of work exhibition was going on at the Tate, and it was being celebrated all around the UK. We wanted to do something to show honour to his work and celebrate him. As students, and practitioners, we asked ourselves, what could we take back with us and what could we do to push our visions forward. In this collaboration project, we dared to ask, what if we could make his art come to life. 

Visuals was Hockney. Two main elements from his work, distortion and his portraits of loved ones, became our main focus (after many meetings). He often was drawn to create portraits of his close family and friends as his subject and so, moving forward from this idea, each of our team members contributed a photo of our loved ones to be used as primary research. To turn it up a notch, we made the portrait distortion experimentations marry Hockney's landscape paintings because nature played a big role in his life's work.

“If you want to replenish your visual thinking, you have to go back to nature," - David Hockney

Colour palette was also Hockney. Vivid, muted.

Silhouettes came from his pool series. For example, A Bigger Splash (we all admitted it was one of our favourites), was made in the late sixties. Thats where the idea rang from. The collection that we wanted to create was to encapsulate the late sixties. Connection was made, dived into vogue archives, pin-pointed and formulated strong garment details. Designed about 80, 10 made the cut, 5 made it to production. 

Im not gonna even go into construction, production and scheduling everything. It. Was. Bonkers. Those are notes from one meeting and a frontsheet sample. Yes I'm showing you a collection but bare in mind, we had a long checklist of what needed to be submitted to university. Portfolio, design development, technical folder, sketchbook etc etc etc. Im talking heaps of stress. And every little detail had to be thoughtfully refined throughout.

Combining creativity, scratch that at the end of the day, every inch of will power from each member of the team, we aimed to take a twist and create a collection that is an extension of David Hockney but with the soul of the sixties. Meeting in perfect harmony. This is what we gave birth to and I very much hope you like it.

p/s its so much harder to write for myself because Ive looked at it too much! 

Collection was featured on @toksickmagazine, here.

Also on @noctismagazine, here.