Our favourite book sculptor Nicholas Jones (Bibliopath) and teams up with fashion designer Warren Harrison (Made by Warren) for a new collaborative project, "Without Bias" at Craft Victoria this month.
For this new body of work, Jones and Harrison explore the technique of binding as a crossover point in their respective practices. Harrison has incorporated basic bookbinding techniques to create simple, yet elegant garments with a distinctively bookish twist. Jones has used found tailoring and design publications as the basis of a series of new sculptures. This exhibition aims to bring together two unique practices and to explore the processes behind the creation of art and fashion.
Nicholas Jones is a Melbourne-based sculptor using books and printed paper as his medium. Adopting techniques of folding, tearing, carving and sewing to build form, Jones aims to highlight the poetic, transformative nature of the book as an object.
After graduating from Experimental Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins’ College of Art and Design in London, Warren Harrison released a small range of hand crafted 'one off's' under his Made By Warren label. In his design process, Warren typically casts aside the formal constraints of garment construction to explore notions of prêt-a-porter verses the unwearable.
A little interview with curator Nella Themelios about Without Bias.
What brought these two artists together?
NELLA: Nick and Warren are old friends. In our initial discussions, I asked Nick whether he would be willing to consider his work through the lense of fashion; to work perhaps with a tailor or designer to develop a new dialogue within his sculptural practice. He came back to me with Warren (!) - an emerging fashion designer whom he had been informally mentoring. Together they developed the concept of 'binding' as a sculptural switchpoint between their practices.
What is the mood of this collaboration and exhibition?
NELLA: The show is really an experiment - both Nick and Warren have challenged and extended themselves to find a way to 'converse' through making.
How do you think that art, craft and fashion sit together?
NELLA: Art never escapes the relentness hum of the fashion system.
If you could "wear" any book - what would it be?
NELLA: If we think of 'wearing' as an inhabitation of a space, then it would have to be The Picture of Dorian Gray -that's a fictional world I can always get lost in.
Nicholas Jones and Warren Harrison, Without Bias
Part of the 2010 L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural Program
Opening 11 March 6-8pm, showing until 24 April 2010
31 Flinders Lane
Melbourne VIC 3000