Recent graduate of NCAD and Future Makers Award recipient Mairead Fox creates intricate and tactile textiles which go hand-in-hand with a measured approach to proportion and colour, further displaying the intrinsic nature of craft in fashion design born out of Ireland.
If we could start by you telling us a little about yourself?
I’m 22 and I’m originally from North County Dublin, in between Swords and Ashbourne. I’ve always wanted to do fashion, originally when I was in school, my main focus was to do fashion. I didn’t really know much about textiles or making fabrics, really just doing fashion design was my end-goal. I applied for NCAD, did the portfolio year and, when I got in there, I started to explore other things like sculpture and art. When you’re in NCAD you start opening up to a lot of different things and then I found textiles which for me was somewhere in between just doing pattern cutting. I could stretch it out a bit more and see what else I could do, work with different materials and fabrics. The first year was a general year; different bits like weaving, but what I eventually went into was screen-printing and printed textiles which, for me, actually wouldn’t have been what I was exactly thinking about doing, but at the same time I couldn’t find myself settling in a different area. What I liked about *[Textile Design]* was that you were busy all the time every day, creating and making things, and seeing what to do with it then after that. That’s why I loved it, we were always working through a process. In fourth year we got to take what we had learned and use it in our own way which was really good.
What inspired your graduate collection?
The tile of my graduate collection was ‘Touch, Handle, and Interaction’, and really what I wanted to do was create fabrics that had a real touch sensibility and emphasise how you really wanted to interact with these fabrics. You know when you’re in a shop and touch something and you think ‘Oh, wow!’, or with knitwear where you want to grab it and it’s nice and warm! I’m really interested in that whole side of fabrics because I feel personally that everything has to have a surface – if it’s flat it’s not good enough, I want it to have a texture.
I found myself a bit stuck in Printed Textiles because everything was a bit flat and nothing was giving me that texture. I came across a technique called Expandex, which is a heat process, so you screen-print with the Expandex and then you process the fabric in a Bakeroven and what would happen would be the fabric would change and form into these different kinds of shapes. I developed that over the year, and what I learned was that I was working 2D to 3D, thinking of form, and then flat shapes, and then back to form. I would put very flat vector shapes on the screen to print – lines, and very uniform and sequenced patterns. So I screen-printed them, and I would use a lot of stretch and synthetic fabric like jersey so that the fabric would bulk up in different ways because of the elastic in them. I would put the printed fabric in the Bakeroven, so the different yarns would stretch and pull and create these pleats and different shapes. That was really fun. I would choose my fabric by basically touching everything in Dublin, feeling and testing them, finding out what worked, which was quite exciting because you didn’t really know what way it was going to come out and you just had to go for it.
For my colour palette I kept everything quite tonal, I feel that you pay more attention to the detail of something when you’re not really distracted by the colour. I wanted them to be very systematic; blue against blue, amber with amber so that everything is very co-ordinated. I worked everything around four or five colours and everything spawned from that.
What really inspired all of my work was my photography. I’ve always had a really strong interest in photography. I would go out and take lots of pictures and when I looked at them, I’d see that there are photographs in the same colour or photographing the same kind of texture, so that there was always an order. That’s really what brought the rest of my collection together. I focused on the blue, the beige, the amber, the white. It was really a direct response to me looking around my environment.
You can find out more about Mairead Fox Textile Design on on her Facebook page.
Words: Honor Fitzsimons
