Enduring Fascination of Natural Form for Designer and Craftman
LIANG Y U H UANG
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NATURE AND ORNAMENT Enduring Fascination of Natural Form for Designer and Craftman
The best way of ornament design is to escape from directly imitating nature but still maintaining the principle and spirit in an abstractive way. Each ornament has its own story to tell through its visual language. My project focuses on how to use textile to evaluate natural form and express the narrative of nature. The aim is to show how artwork presents nature in an evaluating way and to express how people should lead their lives in harmony with nature. The process of creating architectural ornament is similar to that of textile in many ways. The process of knitting wool yarns in to a whole piece of textile has always been an opportunity for adornment and decoration. The various approaches of deciding materials, crocheting the structures, and detailing the surfaces have helped to create distinctive styles. Comprised primarily of all white sheep’s wool, my work utilizes the material to symbolize divinity embracing natural world. The wools’ insular quality signifies warmth and protection, which presents the purity of natural world. The white colour draws audience’s attention to focus on the narrative structure of nature.
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Ornament may appear in the form of carved stone or wood; molded or cast plaster; and cast or wrought metal; as well as in paint, fabric, mosaic, or other surface treatments. Instead of using those hard and cold materials for actual architectural ornament, I decide to choose wool, which is soft and warm with good quality of hands. Therefore, the ornament, which is made of wool, is no longer something faraway and untouchable for people. It becomes more associable and can be part of home decoration textile today.
270 x 140 cm / Wool 8
Architectural ornament is an essential element to represent culture of ancient civilizations from all over the world. We could see ornament as delightful historical fragments, which represent the history, culture and religion in different places. With decades of weathering time passing by, ornament still exists in many modern buildings, tells us history from the past, interacts the culture with present, and perhaps inspires us for future.
Nature is one of the most important inspirations for ornament design. As we can see from buildings on the street, flora and foliation patterns appear everywhere. In the best periods of art, most of the ornament design was based upon an observation of the principles, which regulate the arrangement of form in nature.
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When it came to design, it was always a hint from nature, not only from natural detail, but also from natural growth. The inspiration we can get from nature is incredible. Sometimes we might find that an order in nature that was not susceptible to improvement by mankind. The use of nature in art and design is based on the observation of nature. When we look at the details of nature element, we might see the order in natural is beyond our imagination. Even a single tiny line in plant’s structure has its own principle.
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Speaking of the pattern of natural form on ornament, the foliated scroll is certainly the outstanding one. It provides the rhythmic motif in the history of Western ornament. The rhythmic system for visual design can be produced and recreated over time. There is infinite variation of foliated scroll. The fundamental rhythms, narratives, and fantasias that issue from the foliated scroll seems to have visual lives of their own.
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During the research of ornament patterns I found out that normally the elements, which appear in ornament, tend not to be rendered realistically, but formalized and abstracted so that they are perceived as pattern rather than as pictorial representation. This is not to say that ornamental figures are not of visual interest for their own sake, but that they always point beyond themselves to the larger compositional framework in which they play their punctuating role.
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The process of how architects send message through carving on wall as architectural ornament inspired my creation process. To follow that, I use hand crochet and felting technique to imitate the nature form and to send my message- expressing how people should lead their lives in harmony with the world of nature. Crochet is one of the traditional handcraft, which is also a very flexible way to show the creative spirit as it can easily join pieces together. Artist might use drawing, printing or curving to create images and forms in order to express their emotion. For me, Crochet and felting share the same function as those treatments. They are ways of creating forms by controlling the density of yarns and the tension of each loop. I believe that to cherish handcraft is what gives the artwork value.
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NATURE AND ORNAMENT Enduring Fascination of Natural Form for Designer and Craftman
Textile Designer / Liang Yu Huang Photographer / Clara Giaminardi Stylist / Sophie Liu Makeup / Katrina Gee
 Model / Becky Strauch Graphic Designer / Shaochuan Lee
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Enduring Fascination of Natural Form for Designer and Craftman