Artists
Geneviève Dion
Professor of Design
Westphal College of Media Arts and Design & Center for Functional Fabrics, Drexel University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Statement
Geneviève Dion has extensive background in bespoke clothing and industrial design, her design work is in the permanent collections of the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. At the core of her research Dion explores novel processes that allow the metamorphosis of planar materials into unique three-dimensional forms. Within this focus, her lab investigates modular production and mass customization of 3D knit fabrication for the development of seamlessly integrated fabric interfaces.
Artworks
Knitogami 1&2
45.0 x 30.0 x 30.0 cm
Knitted synthetic yarn
2013
“Knitogami™ 1&2" are bespoke knitted sculptures created with a combination of intuitive design based on the geometric interplay between knit and purl stitches and textile post processing techniques. The sculptures were created using a commercial Shima Seiki WHOLEGARMENT™ knitting machine, knitted in one piece to create complex forms that self-fold as they come out of the machine; no hand manipulation is required to achieve the folds. The yarn selection enables soft and semi-rigid regions, and each piece is “hand sculpted” post knitting. These semi-rigid sculptures feature horizontal rib stitches that maintain a wide circumference while the central regions shrink, softly corrugating in Miura-Ori like patterns.