There is a textile piece made by multidisciplinary artist and designer Jacob Olmedo that incorporates densely appliqued opaque oblong beads.
Olmedo posted a brief film of the textile on his site to show how the beads - that at times look like feathers - move on the body, calling to mind the tentacle arms of a sea anemone moving under water.
If you analyse the piece carefully, though, you realise that there is something trapped inside the beads - a seed. The beads aren’t indeed made of plastic, but of isomalt, a sugar-based material and are made following a 3D printing process.
Inspired by indigenous beadmaking and the notion of circularity, the textile piece is part of Olmedo's "Endangered Identity" project and could be considered as a wearable "armor" about the power of life: the isomalt fossilized seeds, symbols of resilience, tell stories of migration and, once released and planted, they will generate life. Olmedo calculates that one garment equals 70 square feet of regenerative soil creation.
Based in Brooklyn, NY, Olmedo, a Parsons School of Design MFA Textile 2020 Graduate, is inspired by the climate crisis, but also by his identity as a queer artist and activist.
Other pieces included in the "Endangered Identity" project include indeed a second skin-like hand-beaded machine knit bodysuit that looks like the liquid-cooled garments worn by astronauts under their outer spacesuits, and that symbolizes the process of externalizing internal feelings.
Other textile installations part of this project – including disembodied human parts and topographical landscapes – tackle instead the relationships between the land and the environment and minority bodies.
Olmedo opted for cream colored wool and silk fibers for this project so that the viewer can focus on the actual textiles, on their tactile power (touch is one of the senses that has suffered the most during the Coronavirus pandemic) and on how caring for the environment also means caring for one another and caring for innovative yet sustainable textiles as well.
In the last few years Olmedo has been carrying out in-depth researches in hydroponic systems: inspired also by the geotextiles of German artist Diana Scherer who creates rugs and tapestries hacking the root system of plants, Olmedo engineered a 100% biodegradable hydroponic textile that grows fresh plants from which he constructed the clothes for his "And The World Will Be As One" collection.
For this collection the plants grew from seeds implanted into his wool textiles that integrated layers of beeswax for waterproofing, a blend of fibres that held moisture and wood pulp that held the seeds and stored the nutrients needed for the plants to flourish. In this way he created veritable wearable gardens with tufted effects made integrating yarns and grass.
As a materials student Olmedo won the first BFA Fashion Future Textiles Award in 2017 and a year later he was honored to be the first Liz Clairbone Graduate Scholar from The Council of Fashion Designers of America during his time in the inaugural MFA Textiles program at Parsons School of Design.
Last year Olmedo won the Dorothy Waxman International Textile Design Prize. Part of Li Edelkoort and Philip Fimmano's talking Textiles initiatives to promote textile education and creativity, the prize honors Dorothy Waxman, the original driving force behind Trend Union and Edelkoort Inc. in the United States and a contributing reporter to the magazines View on Colour, Textile View and Viewpoint.
The 2021 competition has actually just been launched, so if you're currently enrolled in an educational institution teaching textiles, fashion, interior or lifestyle textiles or if you're a 2020 or 2021 textile or fashion graduate, you can still take part in it with projects revolving around sustainability and innovation. Submissions (you will have to send the story behind your textiles and images of your work) must be emailed to: [email protected] by June 30, 2021. You can find the complete submission rules and the application form here.
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