Thursday, March 29 from 5:00 – 6:00pm
Elizabeth Holloway Schar Hall | Nancy Nicholas Hall | 1300 Linden Dr. | UW-Madison
Elaine Igoe’s lecture, Remaking Design Theory from the Textile Matrix, will focus on the research from her book, Textile Design Theory in the Making. Exploring how textile design bridges the decorative and the functional, Igoe’s lecture will take listeners from handcrafting to industrial manufacture. In doing so, she wil distinguishes textiles as a distinctive design discipline, against the backdrop of today’s emerging design issues. Igoe will demonstrate how textile design theory is now being employed in diverse scenarios to encourage innovation beyond the field of design itself.
About the Speaker
Elaine Igoe’s research interests include design theory, postdigital and responsible textile and material futures. She holds an undergraduate degree in Multi Media Textile Design from Loughborough University, a Masters in Textiles for Fashion from Central St Martins and a PhD in Textiles from the Royal College of Art entitled “In Textasis: Matrixial Narratives of Textile Design” which focuses on articulating textile design practice within and beyond existing and emerging design theory. She adopts materials, texts and processes and adapts and innovates with them to create new surfaces, fabrications and texts. Her award-winning work has included embroidered textile skin transfers, magnetized cloth coated in iron creating a ferrous needlecord and astrakhan and applying hair and silk fibers in the electrostatic flocking process. Her theoretical work in design research utilizes feminist qualitative research methods, exploring relationality through storytelling, autoethnography and metaphor. It both commentates on and aims to establish the position of textile design with design research discourses and global contexts.
Positioning textiles within contemporary design research, Igoe’s book Textile Design Theory in the Making reveals how the theory and practice of textile design exist in a synergistic, creative relationship. Drawing on qualitative research methods, including auto-ethnography and feminist critique, the book provides a theoretical underpinning for textile designers working in interdisciplinary scenarios, uniting theory and texts from the fields of anthropology, philosophy, literature and material design. You can read a short preview here: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/610a42aa52faff000154a7d6