Milan Design Week starts in two days, but the city is already abuzz with installations, exhibitions and events. "Home Sweet Home" by Alessandra Roveda is for example already on display at the Missoni Showroom (via Solferino 9; from today until 14th April).
Roveda is a graduate in Industrial Design from the Politecnico di Milano, but she has a passion for a special traditional craft that she nurtured since her childhood – crocheting.
Roveda's grandmother inspired the artist to start crocheting, but in her practice this craft is applied to create visually striking pieces inspired by ordinary objects.
Conceiving crocheting hooks like brushes and yarns like paints, Roveda covers in polychromatic layers of fabric ordinary objects. Her technique is inspired by yarn bombing and calls to mind the crocheting interventions of other seminal or contemporary artists who have used this medium in their practices, from Faith Wilding to Joana Vasconcelos.
Angela Missoni commissioned Roveda to create an installation inspired by Spring and by the history of the fashion house for the brand's showroom during Milan Design Week: the result is a colourful space, populated with objects we may find in our daily lives, from tables and chairs to sofas and armchairs, beds, books and shelves, bicycles and clocks.
All of them seem to have been touched by Rainbow Brite's magic and have lost their function: the artist dressed up indeed all the objects in multi-coloured knits.
These objects transform an ordinary and commercial space into a soft and surreal fun landscape, a fairy-tale like set in which yarns are used to recreate Missoni's trademark fiammato or zig-zagging motifs.
"Home Sweet Home" is more a commercial installation than a way of questioning the role of women or tackling issues like domesticity and feminism, but it works pretty well on the visual and tactile level, proving that yarns can be used to transform even the dullest object into something fun and unique, and the most ordinary space into a repository of daydreams.
Image credits for this post
1 – 6. Installation view at Showroom Missoni – "Home Sweet Home" by Alessandra Roveda. Photographs by Christan Michele
7. Angela Missoni and Alessandra Roveda share some crocheted sushi at "Home Sweet Home" at the Missoni Showroom. Photograph by Christan Michele.