Karen Nicol's Lecture

Last Thursday (24th Feb) I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture from Karen Nicol all about her work and what she does. I found the lecture incredibly interesting and got a great insight to how she works. 

She use to do a lot of bespoke work in fashion working behind the scenes for big names by embellishing their garments. She now works a lot more in interiors, displaying work in perspex boxes. The interior side of the industry is a lot slower than the fashion side which she likes and she  finds that you can push boundaries a lot more and push forward the 3D elements of textiles.

With fashion, Karen spoke about how a designer would come to her 6/4 weeks before a show with a brief and ideas of how they wanted their garment to look. She'd then go away and spend two days solid producing lots of samples adhering to the designers character. Karen and the designer would then meet up again and discuss what
worked and what didn't. She'd then be given a garment to
embellish before the deadline of the show.

I found it quite interesting that Karen gets a lot of inspiration from car boot sales. She collects and buys things that visually appeal to her. She hangs these things around her studio aswell as using the objects within her work. Looking back over her work, Karen has found strong links between what has been hanging around her studio and her textiles which she hadn't realised had happened.

Karen said her favourite part of the whole process is getting the idea and making it work. She advised not to
be precious with it, saying "The more rules you can
 break, the better"

These are just a handful of things I found out from the lecture, I found it incredibly inspiring and it gave me a lot of insight into the industry, both with fashion and interiors.

Along the right hand side are just a few photographs of work that Karen Nicol brought in for us to have a look at.