Everyday new words are added to our collective dictionaries, many of them often belonging to the semantic field of technology, our existences are, after all, shaped by technology.
Last year, as you may remember, the emphasis was on a specific word, composed of just three letters - NFT (non-fungible token) - that became Collins Dictionary's word of the year, while the Oxford English Dictionary named "vax" as its 2021 word.
Who knows what kind of new words may enter our global and personal glossaries in 2022, but you can bet we will use a lot "metaverse", coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel "Snow Crash", and standing for a three-dimensional virtual world (think about Mark Zuckerberg's rebranded Facebook company, Meta). Besides, as the Omicron variant of Covid-19 keeps on rapidly spreading, these first weeks of the year may be characterized by "hybrid working", a term that refers to the practice of alternating between different working environments, such as home and the office.
But there is a word that isn't so popular yet in our global dictionaries, but that textile artists, fashion and interior designers and creative minds interested in developing innovative surfaces with a heightened sense of tactility about them, often use on social media - "textiling"
Textiling can be applied to the work of Cristina Cabada who makes experimental pieces employing liquid silicone rubber to create textures inspired by nature.
The Spanish-born, London-based artist, who studied fashion at Parsons NYC, creates tops and dresses made with this material, assembling highly tactile silicone parts that she molds on natural elements.
The results are stunning as some of these silicone pieces with their three-dimensional spikes and spirals evoke the shapes and configurations of corals, volcanic rocks, leaves, mushrooms, conglomerates of algae and shells as well.
The liquid silicone manages to replicate the tiniest details of these organic formations, creating something fascinating and slightly disturbing as well.
Some of Cabada's pink tops or designs look indeed like something that grows out of the wearer's body, radically transforming it from human into alien, as proved also by the Alien Silicone dress she made in collaboration with Threeasfour, donned by Björk on the cover of W Magazine's Special Collector's Issue (November 2017).
Among the best experiments Cabada made there are elements made by covering Romanesco broccoli in liquid silicone as the vegetable has got a unique form approximating a natural fractal with each bud composed of a series of smaller buds, all arranged in a logarithmic spiral (View this photo).
The pattern is only an approximate fractal as it terminates when the feature size becomes sufficiently small, but it's interesting to note that the number of spirals on the head of Romanesco broccoli is a Fibonacci number.
Cabada's work is a great example of textiling inspired by nature that maybe one day will inspire accessories as well (on Cabada's Instagram page there is a silicone mold for a clutch, so who knows…). In the meantime, it would be nice to see if costumes for a ballet may be created from some of these textiling experiments.
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