Helen Storey with Tony Ryan, Wonderland – biodegradable materials
Wonderland, a collaborative touring fashion/art/science project, has just been nominated for the Brit Insurance Designs of the year 2009.
“Over the past three years artist/designer Professor Helen Storey, London College of Fashion and scientist Professor Tony Ryan OBE from The University of Sheffield have collaborated to create real solutions for a more sustainable world.
Opera Coat, photography credit Nick Knight
Storey and Ryan first investigated the possibilities behind packaging that would ‘know when it was empty and disappear’. At first the world of science was understandably sceptical of the notion of a ‘bottle with consciousness’ but through the vehicle of fashion, a Trojan horse was created to deliver the concept in an unexpected form.
The Wonderland exhibition focuses therefore on Disappearing Dresses and Dissolving Bottles - both provocations to think differently about our over use of diminishing resources. Plastic is actually precious – it is buried sunshine, and will soon be gone.
The Disappearing Dresses are made from textiles developed by Trish Belford and team at Interface, University of Ulster. They dissolve on contact with water. The dresses are hung from scaffolds and gradually lowered into giant goldfish bowls of water. Each dress ‘behaves’ differently as it is submerged. The dissolving material can create vibrant underwater fireworks that are magnified by the giant spherical bowls. Using fashion as a metaphor, the dresses symbolise our disappearing world and have triggered a broad dialogue with diverse audiences around shared habits of consumption and waste.
The focus of their original work - the Dissolving Bottles - is an exploration of intelligent packaging. Once finished with, the bottles dissolve under hot water to form a gel in which seeds, which are dispensed from the cap, can be grown. The plastic bottle has vanished, and flowers have taken its’ place. The concept could revolutionise the packaging industry and aims to highlight issues surrounding waste plastic.
Wonderland opened as an exhibition at the London College of Fashion in January 2008 and then toured to Sheffield in June in a city-wide event, where the fashion symbolism was not lost on the vast audience at Meadowhall Shopping Centre as they began to question their fashion and environmental habits in response to the work. The project then went on to Belfast - It has now been seen by an estimated 11 million people.
In order to elucidate the collision of fashion and science in Wonderland the model Alice Dellal was shot by Nick Knight in a film short showing the dissolve of one of the outfits disappearing from her body in seconds.
