Selected Projects
Denim Day NYC
BK Style Foundation, anti-trafficking organization Beauty for Freedom, Council for Fashion and Social Change and visual artists/designers Fabiola Jean-Louis, Katya Akuma, Chantel Valentene, Monica Watkins, Jerry Chu and Butch Diva (Tiffany Rhodes) have partnered with City-As School in creating a Denim Day NYC Video and Photographic Campaign raising awareness for the survivors of sexual and domestic violence.
I worked on collaborative recycled denim capsule collection for Denim Day NYC Campaign with visual artists/designers Fabiola Jean-Louis, Chantel Valentene, Monica Watkins, Jerry Chu and Butch Diva along with design students Alex Lora, Anna Schwab and Hazel Cetemen from City-As School. My role was to teach design students sewing and recycling skills and to secure fabric/materials donations.
3D Printed Sculptural Dress created for The Museum of Modern Art Pop Rally. Made out of recycled PET filament from old PET bottles. It’s up to 90% recycled!
Co-Designed with Sylvia Heisel and Scott Taylor.
Keep the Girls Safe Textile Installation
Keep the Girls Safe Installation, 2016, Natural dyes, cotton and linen fabric, Size (m): 3.50 x 1.50
Textile installation was specifically created for the “Keep the Girls Safe Campaign”. The campaign’s mission was to engage the industries of Beauty and Fashion as powerful allies in the fight to end sex trafficking. I created 6 Freedom-inspired naturally dyed recycled fabric panels, that were dropped from the ceiling into the space below. I used recycled fabric because it is already charged with layers of history and personal stories. Together with the dance performance, textile installation revealed psychological messages related to sex trafficking
Latewoo Fabric
I developed a “Latewoo” fabric that is made out of latex, wood shavings and wool waste discarded by students in the Industrial Design, Fashion Design and Furniture Design departments. All the natural components are both environmentally friendly and recyclable. To turn wood and wool waste into a lightweight and moldable material material/fabric, I mixed all the components using specific formula. Wood is used as the reinforcement, natural latex as the binder. As a result I got a simple and affordable to produce material that could be commercially very
successful. Different types of wood shavings an colors of wool add multitude variations of textures and shades.
WHY “LATEWOO”?
Through the exploration into the wool and wood value chain a high volumes of post-consumer waste were identified as a space or potential innovation. Wool clothes are often discarded when their potential lifetime is over. I would like to look at the possibility of extending a life cycle of discarded clothes and highlight its value. Latewoo creatively reuse clothes and significantly contribute to the reducing of the environmental impacts of clothing.
“ It is essential that strategies are developed with sympathy to the existing values and lifestyles of the people they wish to engage. If not, they are likely to be rejected or ignored. It is a matter of developing tangible solutions that appeal to people’s current attitudes, values and fit within or naturally extend from their existing lifestyles.” Catherine Pears, 2006