Couture Vivante — Linda Nurk

Couture Vivante - BIO GROWN Fashion

My work began as aspirational research - a proof-of-concept - combining raw elements of nature with couture. Through the development of home-grown bio-textiles and urban micro-farming I have found a path towards a “wild” mix of biodegradable methods in body-sculpted shapes & textiles.

My aim is to re-connect our consciousness of how we use materials with our universal story of growth & rebirth, critically illustrating our human experience as integral, inseparable and essentially symbiotic with our natural resources and connected life cycles.

Both through the process of manufacture and in the final aesthetic there is an explicit rejection of ‘the machine’ and its ability to give us (the illusion of) control in favour of the momentary capture of the randomness, complexity and serendipitous beauty of living, breathing organisms.

With my work, what you wear is a snapshot of biodiversity that will go back into the ground, fully biodegrade to its base elements and in the future will live again as something new.

Urban Silk farming

After experimenting and refining my techniques with the grown textiles I had a notion that I’d like to set some of those pieces on a translucent bodice...but how to make such a thing with homegrown biodegradable textile?

With great help from my mentor Kees van der Graaf, aka Mr Perspex - the man who made all the torsos and body casts for Alexander McQueen. I realised that instead of producing a translucent silk-like bio-synthetic material to layer the floral kombucha onto, I could in fact grow and raise my own silkworms and have them spin their silk directly onto a torso mould where they would weave the petals & leaves into the very fabric itself.
So I became an urban micro-farmer of silkworms, made a torso mould of my own upper body and put them to work.

In raising silkworms from eggs, seeing them hatch, regularly feeding them with mulberry leaves and watching them grow, I became in tune with their natural life cycles. For a period of a month my daily routine was worked around nurturing these vulnerable and quite messy little children who needed constant care.
Once the worms began to spin it was time for the hand work.

EMBODIMENT VI (Eos)

Watching them work though, ‘hearing’ the music of their rhythm and having us slowly create something beautiful together as I placed petals and leaves in their path for them to wrap was a transformative and therapeutic experience full of little delights of unpredictability.

For instance, when a silkworm crawls across the torso and reaches the edge it turns back on itself in such a way as to create a natural folded hem. They also never move in a straight line as the process of cocooning dictates that their heads move in a three dimensional figure-of-eight, so as they pass back and forth they spin an intense crosshatched lattice veil of a million infinity loops. The final effect (as opposed to refined silk where the worms are boiled alive in their cocoons) is a raw and delicate-looking, though remarkably strong, gossamer surface. I finally let the worms cocoon and metamorphose into moths & lay their eggs. The moths passed away peacefully having done their motherly duty and made way for the cycle to begin again.

FLORA/AR

EMBODIMENT AR (Flora)

I am a romantic but I’m not a Luddite. The post-industrial digital society in which we live allows us to see so much, to learn so much, to share so much. Open source augmented reality offers us the chance to radiate ideas beyond borders and without hierarchy to communicate and organize in innovative ways.

As such, EMBODIMENT contains a further experimental layer in the form of an Augmented Reality application designed by my collaborator

Jonas Johansson.

When viewed through the app the FLORA bustier ‘grows’ an algorithmically generated floral bloom in 3 dimensional digital space. The floral bloom is step one of what could be an entire digital ecosystem. In this augmented reality space the floral bloom could be replaced with or accompanied by any other ‘data’. Each garment’s unique pattern thus becomes an individual code or system of codes that generates and reveals information in the digital realm.

This could be purely embellishment as in our early experimental example or it could be a portal to an entire database of botanical facts, ecosystem connections & conservation status of each of the individual flora in the garment.

Or it could be fully user-customisable to reveal anything the wearer might want to show or say on any given day. You could project your favourite illustrated poem, a treatise on Civil Rights writ large in the sky, a dazzle facemask & subversive slogan for your eco-protest, your spirit animal sitting on your shoulder - your imagination as an outer layer.

In a world where pattern recognition technology is increasingly used for surveillance, control and state violence we need to do all that we can to re-pollinate the military-industrial security infrastructure and let our wildest ideas flow through the datasphere like a digital flower pushed down the barrel of the tech-capitalist gun.

“EMBODIMENT”

ART in fashion

Sven-harrys Konstmuseum, Stockholm

feb 14th-sep 27th, 2020