Flux: Turn & Face the Strange

This summer I had the opportunity to travel to Indonesia. I first visited the amazing textile collection at the Jakarta textile museum, hundreds of batik pieces from different parts of Indonesia were displayed, and they were fascinating. The symbols, the stories, the detail. While I was there, I also did a residency at Threads of Life - learning how to Batik and Naturally Dye with Indigo and Ceriops.

I have always been interested in learning about traditional textile techniques. I like understanding why particular processes, materials, colours or symbols are used.

Nature has always been a part of me, having grown up in Athens, but having parents that would love travelling and would take me with them whenever they had a chance. Greece is a small country, that has amazing landscapes. Mountains, waterfalls, the sea, rivers, lakes - even though its known for its islands, the mainland is also fascinating and there is a variety of landscapes.

Since I moved to London, I have travelled to many places with both friends and family. I always try to use my travelling in my work as a designer, continuing the journey, and showing elements of what I have learnt while travelling in my drawings or textile samples.

One of the most important personal journey for me was going to Iceland. The landscapes I saw took my breath away, every single time. Driving around the whole island I had the opportunity to see the landscapes change every few minutes. It was mesmerising, full of surprises.

Flux is change, and these three years at Chelsea College of Arts have changed me, I was always interested in these three ‘ideas’ however it took me a long time to realise. I know that they will always interest me and provide me with what I need in order to create textile pieces in the future.

For this project, I used my drawings and photographs of my trip to Iceland, and chose to abstract the landscapes. I wanted to use the technique of Batik, to further explore what I have learnt in the summer. My symbols are from nature. The lines in my batiks, symbolise the movements of the icebergs, the mountains, the water in the waterfalls or the lakes. The irregular shapes on my batiks are found from the moss shapes on the rocks, the different shapes of seaweeds and shells, the rock formations found in caves.

Having Flux in mind, and not only wanting to use the abstraction of landscapes as ‘change’ in my project, I decided to play with the idea of ‘Old and New’. I therefore digitally printed some of my drawings and then batiked and naturally dyed them on top, using both new and old techniques and kind of creating my own.