TF/19-20
Projects supported in 2019-20.
Izzy Fulford
How can we come to view our physicality as a resource rather than a destiny? I have designed and documented a making process that directly implicates and utilises the physical body in the fabrication of wearable objects, reframing the onset of 'wear' as a productive bodily output. I use knit as my primary medium because it enables me to make my own fabrics, selectively combining yarns into knitted structures with body-reactive properties. With funding from the Tom Fund, I was able to purchase a knitting machine, which was vital to my project as it enabled me to experiment with techniques and fibres I had wanted to use but are too difficult to work with by hand. My making process is not finished once my work comes off the knitting machine, rather it is usually just starting. The materials I have developed react to wear in ways that are destructive and constructive, permanent and temporary, extreme and subtle.
Jamilya Kulambayeva
We dream about ruins and ruins dream about us. We haunt each other with our absence as we yearn to reconnect. Yet, a new type of ruins and artefacts emerged from the unconventional virtual spaces of online gaming servers.
The Minecraft’s oldest anarchy server - 2b2t in the last 9 years has become a cradle for hundreds of architectural structures created by its players. However, inevitable clashes between players and griefers allowed the collections' pixelated cubes to evolve into virtual ruins that are untouched by real-time or decay; left as immovable monuments behind computer screens to excavate as historical artefacts of childhood imagination and digital play.
The Digital Archeology of Virtual Plane is a growing archive of these builds and artefacts in order to record this history using archeological methodologies of recorded observations, drawings, remote sensing maps and interviews with the 2b2t player community.
The awarded Tom Fund helped me take my project down a more professional route: I cast a professional voice actor to voice a series of audioguides accompanying virtual ruins. The Tom Fund support allowed me to create a narrative driven engagement that combined the stories told by living culture of the server, and without it I would not have been able to retell their stories.
Nye Conant
It all started with a black panther.
Not on the television. Not in a cage. But just outside my house.
A house in East Northamptonshire, UK. A black panther walking down the footpath.
Black panthers, or ‘Alien Big Cats’ as they are nicknamed, have been spotted roaming the British countryside since the 70s - a myth / fable / folktale / anecdote I have been fed as a child growing up in these Northamptonshire woods. The big cat.
The film merges true accounts with elements of fiction; following a man who, after years of searching, has become completely absorbed into the myth.
He lives between the real world and the ‘non-real’ world, held in purgatory…
Tom Fund allowed me to hire professional film and sound equipment with which I was able to produce my film to the highest possible standard. Hiring a gimble stabiliser meant I could film stable shots at speed through fields and woodland. The sound recording equipment meant I could listen and record every detail - from the rustling of trees and birds singing to recording my own voice. I don’t know what my film would have been without it, so thank you! Watch the film at the attached website!
Lauren Coutts
My project used the bellyface as a trojan horse to play a part in a celebratory shift between derogatory belly scrutiny to a more deserving sense of pride in the belly’s potential for frowning, smooshing, imitating, dancing, whistling, flirting, lip-syncing, feasting, sneezing, giggling etc, for joy. It culminated into a Virtual Bellyface Pageant in which people entered a 10 second video of them making any face of sorts on their belly contort, twist, gasp, frown, furrow, smoosh, stretch, inflate, float, bloat etc. These entries were uploaded to a hub which aimed to also give encouraging context for the pageant. The Tom Fund allowed me to have access to comprehensive website features to get my own domain (www.bellyfacepageant.com) and access the feature of visitors being able to upload files. These features added a sense of credibility which was essential when I was asking people to make themselves vulnerable and to trust me with that. We had cher lip-syncs, marge take-offs, Star-stomachs, kisses, operatic masterpieces, and countless other wonders which were shown and awarded prizes in a screening for the contestants. A fold of skin becomes exciting squidgy potential for extra emotional range, a point of pride, as opposed to detriment to confidence.
Isabella Akaleigh Jones
‘Rosemary for Remembrance’ is a project about memory, ritual, and psychology, stemming from my Grandmother's condition of memory loss, Dementia.
I have been working with my grandmother for over a year, introducing her into a series of planned experiences in Wales and in the Canary Islands: for example, a reenactment of: ‘A Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ or ‘Los Indianos Carnival’. To capture her interactions, an unobtrusive filming technique was created, mirroring elements of her condition, such as her focus on detail, allowing for an immersion into her reality.
The Tom Fund allowed me to source the necessary materials for creating underwater footage: aiming at visualising the subconscious realm of my Grandmother’s memory. Delving into an unexplored watery world allowed me to bring Design into new depths.
Each day my grandmother comes to my project anew, she sees it for the first time, again and again, we are in a loop and as we move around, residues of memories are accumulating and taking form. Within this unique learning environment, a final film piece was created.
The aim of this project is to disrupt the often frustrating and repetitive routines within the reality of the Carer: Cared-for relationship; creating a positive outlook on a condition perceived as one of loss and deterioration.
www.isabella-jones.com isabellaajones@gmail.com
Michelle O'Higgins
My project interrogated the future of digital labour and the disembodiment of online microwork. I aimed to redesign computing interfaces in a way that required the exaggerated movement of the body, activating clumsiness as a call for temporal flexibility in our expectations of labour performances today. Using the Tom Fund award, I purchased a mechanical treadmill that formed this body operated computer interface; an interactive installation that turns the cognitive labour of training algorithms into manual labour. Alongside this, I used the fund to pay Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to write a short story about their online labour, which became distributed via chain mail to form a series of ‘Micro-stories’. These became an accumulation of short, collaboratively written fictions that tell tales of overwork, precarity and uncertainty as a 'flexible' worker in the gig economy today.
Eva Jane Gates
If muscles alone have the power to subvert restricting, artificial stereotypes imposed on women in Western societies, then weightlifting with “Girli Concrete” weights exposes the artificiality and inauthenticity of traditional ‘gender’ and sex ideals. By exploring weightlifting through literary, theoretical, material and performative lenses, I aim to dissociate out-dated, negative connotations of women as as objects to possess not to respect. Powersnatch is about women not having to assert themselves in certain space; about women being valued and respected for their endeavours and accomplishments in all spaces.
As a weightlifter, I am constantly morphing and shaping, much like my design practice. Although not bound by one material or technique, I gravitate towards film, photography (digital/analogue), woodworking and textiles. I always strive to have a positive, uplifting and progressive impact on any community in question.
Without receiving the Tom Fund award, Powersnatch would not exist. The award allowed me to purchase an Olympic Weightlifting set, which then enabled me to extract weightlifting from the gym and explore it through a visual, auditory, theoretical and performative lens. I am so incredibly grateful for the Tom Fund. Thank you!
Follow @powersnatchdesign on instagram for more DESIGN x WEIGHTLIFTING updates.
Emily Blake
I wish I was an IKEA plate. I wish the law of simplicity could come into play. Gestalt psychology, that is the theory proposes that the whole object is more important than its individual parts. Maybe a mug might be more suiting. The process of slip casting follows the theory of Gestalt where the consumer is only exposed to an end product and the process is disregarded. With slip casting starting the industrialisation of ceramic wear, the technique is taken for granted now it’s been so commercialised. It juxtaposes the fascination around one’s ethnicity and wanting to know more about your ancestry, than you, the finished product. Slip casting has a choreography to its process, a uniformed repetition that follows a call and response action of explaining yourself. I have used the Tom Fund to help buy the casting materials for the dolls, originally this was going to cover porcelain, glaze and plaster costs. Due to COVID-19 my alternative had to mimic the properties of these materials, so the Fund helped me cover the cost of Jesmonite, silicone and varnish. With these materials, I was able to set up my own casting studio in the comfort of my own home. Thank you.
Nathan Gardiner
Inspired by the hauntological writings from Mark Fisher, I have photographically documented London’s urban landscape, while portraying the haunting of the no longer and not yet spectres that are the resulting cause of the ‘slow cancellation’ of their future.
The two key areas I focused on that characterised this period of limbo were Surrey Quays and North Greenwich. Via the process of capitalist redevelopment both areas had either become culturally sterile or reproductions of their own failed past.
I chose to document these places solely using 35mm film, for this archaic method allowed me to chemically interfere with the developing process while also symbolically re portraying the theory of Hauntology. For instance, by using River Thames water as the developing solution I was able to create decaying photos that mimicked their subject. These photos were later published in a book called ‘Notice of Development’, which acts as a guide to the dislocated landscapes.
The Tom Fund allowed me to purchase more 35mm film, which further encouraged my experimental process while allowing for more picture to be taken. Without this I do not believe I would have been able to produce the successful results I had ended with.
nathan.agardiner@gmail.com Instagram - @nathan.agardiner
Alfie Evans
By utilising critical theory I conducted an anthropological study into our relationship with nostalgia to uncover why in my observations it seems that the world around me most potently expresses itself through the past in fields such as: fashion, interior design, architecture, art, film, editorials, curation, marketing, music, theater, etc. This study developed into a methodology for appraching research and ideation through my nostalgia for the film Saturday Night Fever that could engender new performances of the past that would help in the development of gender and cultural production by ensuring a duty, rather than automatic pastiche that was achieved through critical forensic analysis.
The Tom Fund helped me by providing funds to create a costume that would allow me to engage with my nostalgia for the film Saturday Night Fever during my quest to better understand it as well as my nostalgia. This enabled me to critically enact performances from the film and weave new narratives and discourses into performances which I would like to expand and explore further beyond my time at Goldsmiths.
Sam Ray
In my project I explored the evasiveness of memory and emotion by manifesting encounters with strangers through a series of motifs. Through different materials I considered how bodies can process matter, how time changes us and things around us, and how we can seek solace amidst uncertainty.
The Tom Fund was extremely useful in helping me execute my hopes for this work, as it allowed me to access the array of materials I wanted to work with, I'm extremely grateful that this was available to me and my coursemates.
Jack Lowerson
‘London’s Lost Garden’ comprises a performance script, podcast radio play and promotional film, which narrativizes the Protest against the private property developers 'Hutchinson Whampoa', who wish to build private apartment buildings upon the Convoys Wharf brownfield site - once the setting for John Evelyn’s infamous 17th century garden.
The project is designed for the campaigners ‘Voice 4 Deptford’, who have called for greater community accountability in the development plans. It forms a critical piece of public engagement that outlines the social and environmental benefits for resurrecting the garden and proposes performance as a more inclusive strategy for implementing public intervention within urban planning initiatives.
The proposal draws from guerrilla gardening - the practice of cultivating privately owned land, and the contemporary theatre design practice eco-scenography, which examines the environmental influences that the objects and sites of performance have on their audiences beyond the theatrical event.
Following the restrictions caused by the Covid-19 crisis, the Tom Fund Award allowed me to hire professional voice actor talents to bring the performance script to life. The resulting podcast radio play was distributed to the public online to keep the debate alive during the UK lockdown. It has since been deployed on the Voice 4 Deptford website to enhance their campaign accessibility.
Yena Kim
Sticky Data Lab is a one-person lab studio space that design and create various experiments and interventions. It exists as a digital platform where individuals can view, interact, and participate in both virtual and physical place. The contents include daily vlogs, physical exercises, speculative installation, face filters and pattern art.
SDL aims for individuals to have a conscious awakening, to think critically on the long term effects of surveillance capitalism, plus reflect on their online activities and the data they produce daily.
The Tom Fund award has supported me to purchase various equipment and materials to create prototypes/test/and develop ideas. I was able to build both virtual and physical user-interactive elements that did not end up as an ‘idea-only’ project. I would like to give massive thanks to Tom Fund for their generosity, especially when the year has been tough with the pandemic.
Lastly, check out stickydatalab.xyz for more information and give yourself an experience!
fred hoad
Through environmental affection I have rejigged my relationship with my urban environment, connecting me with my city through resource gathering and connecting me with the people around me through shared experiences.
Focusing on London’s abundance of free waste resources and the needs of the community within my apartment building, I have experimented with sustainable living techniques, resulting in a community kitchen space created from found materials. This community space provides experience of sustainable cooking techniques and allows folks to come and go as they please, allowing pressure free interactions and connection.
At the heart of the space, is a pizza oven. Made from 90% reclaimed waste, burning with almost no smoke and churning out a stonebaked pizza in just two minutes, this tool has given me and my community the power to come together and share something unique and delicious, in a way that is conscious of our environment. A rare treat that would not have been possible without the support of the Tom fund. Especially since it was built during the Covid pandemic with workshops closed around the globe.
Rachel Rice
As Donna J Harraway states in her book Staying with the Trouble, “Make Kin not babies”.
This project explores the life practice of Making multi-species kin, the making of Local, Loving ecological communities (families). It illustrates the story of one Anthrop becoming-with her surrounding Botanical and Avian lives, and how these three species can tie their lives together in real, possible ways.
kin-making is a practice of living as they dance, eat, grieve, bathe, argue, hurt and sing together.
The Anthrop’s botanical kin live in a different temporality. They move in her stillness, and sing in her silence. Thanks to the Tom Fund she was able to buy specialist electrode sensors, which she connected to an Arduino to measure the electrical impedance of her kin. This allowed her to enter botanical landscapes, listen and empathise with her kins voices and body cycles. With this they are able to co-write, visually and acoustically their stories together and compose lullabies.
rachellucyhelen26@gmail.com
Luke Radcliffe Moore
Biophiliation is a philosophy and process that reimagines objects and spaces through the lens of the planet, applying natural methodologies and forms to create design interventions that take inspiration from, collaborate with, and build upon the blueprint of the natural world.
Within cities filled by brutalist concrete structures and seemingly never-ending streets it’s easy to become absent in all the man-made madness, as a result of this, Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD) is being understood to play a major part in why more and more people are becoming disconnected from our environments, and as a result of this having a less fulfilled standard of living. To involve ourselves in restorative territories immediately combats these negative notions and starts to revitalise us with the natural world, showing us what it is to be “biophilic” and initiating a reconnection to the planet.
Through understanding and connecting with our environments humans can unearth a plethora of elements that can act as valuable resources for our everyday living. In the comprehension of a space all five senses are employed to scan the area and turn the new found information into knowledge. The need to be able to smell a space, touch it, listen to it and taste it are all overshadowed by the primary function of sight, spaces command full immersion and should be designed to facilitate all five senses.
Kaiya Waerea
My work has been looking at the relationship between time and disability, as described by Alison Kafer as 'crip time' in her book Feminist, Queer, Crip. Time is an enforcer of what is normative – the sites, frameworks and objects of time act of tools of oppression against the disabled body/mind.
The Tom Fund enabled me to organise 3 collaborations with other disabled practitioners or allies, and cover costs for the access needs of those I was working with. In these collaborations, through different mediums, we read, discussed, and begin materialising new visions of time, time as we experience it, aggravating the expectation to bend our bodies to meet the clock face and building new temporal languages.
One of these collaborations (with Jane Hartshorn) has resulted in a pamphlet of poetry and diagrams, soon to be published by Takeaway Press. You can pre-order at takeawaypress.co.uk from the end of July
kaiyawaerea.com kaiyawaerea0@gmail.com insta: @kaiyawaerea
Jokha Suleiman
'Layers' was a project that allowed me to discover the state of existing across cultures and traditions. Racism and Ignorance formed the basis of my project which then directed me to mental health and encouraging mental wellness. The crisis that was going on during the production of this project set off a lot of mixed feelings and anxiety with my creative practice. So, I had to find a way of breaking away from that. The outcome of this was a 3-metre-long, hand printed off white cotton fabric with a hand embroidered continuous line pattern in various coloured threads
It was nice to go back to the basics, planning and creating purely by hand. The fabric became my release in the right direction to mental wellness. Alongside my designing, was some poetry that I have written throughout the whole of my final year. I really pushed myself in this project and it is something that allowed me to break away from the confusion of what I am as a designer.
The Tom Fund allowed me to not restrict myself when selecting materials to work with. I was able to experiment as much as I wanted, and this ensured that I knew exactly how I wanted my final piece to turn out. So, thank you so much!
Seo Yeon Park (Sam Park)
Having suffered from OCD, I document and make a showcase of detailed symptoms I have experienced to draw attention to OCD and have a discussion about the misconceptions around it. My OCD is mainly expressed through an obsession around my eating habits - food has to be eaten in a specific order, manner and way. In this project I position my OCD eating habits in the context of different cultures dining etiquettes so that people can look at OCD compulsions with greater respect and understanding as a different etiquette/culture rather than just a disorder.
According to this, I have taken the form of formal instruction to enable the public to communicate with my rules in a certain context. The Tom Fund award helped me to learn The English Manner’s Afternoon Tea Etiquette course at The Lanesborough, so that I was able to compare with another formal class on Eastern (Korean) Tea Etiquette which I took before. It widened my understanding of table manners in various cultures around Eastern and Western.
Moon Bedeaux
Becoming Witch is an agent for change. A platform created to address our disconnect from the planet, each other and The Divine Feminine - (This is the positive expression of feminine energies that resides within us all.) Due to patriarchal dominion, a great imbalance has occurred…
When I refer to the archetype of the witch, this is not as a maleficent sorcerer.“this is someone who honours the Earth and all of nature, including humanity as divine, sees the divine as male, female, and beyond, someone who honours the cycles of life, partners with the universe to create change, and actively serves for the greater good, then you have a Witch” - Christopher Penczak
By Becoming witch we are learning how to behave in a more conscious way, through embracing our divine feminine.
With this in mind, I was interested in how I could use design to create an artefact, that would function as a healing tool, to help us reconnect back to ourselves and Mother Earth. Through the process of “Witchcrafting”, I set out to create a magical carpet by employing the technique of tufting.
For Millenia, Herbs have been used as a powerful medicinal and magical healing tool, aiding us topically, internally and spiritually. I called upon certain herbs, crystals and the energy of the Full Moon, to guide me and permeate their wisdom throughout the fibres of the carpet, transforming them energetically.
I am very grateful that the Tom fund project enabled me to make this project possible. I was able to purchase all the natural dyes, wools and tufting equipment with the funds I was given.
Francine Chan and Yijun Xiong
We live in an artificial reality, one of human design, over design. Where ecology is dissected and reformed, in the likeness of humans.
Black boxes; the entanglement of human networks; surmounting delirium lost within “Ecological Colonisation”. A qualified world of materiality - the human creation, some sort of alien nature.
The Tom Fund allowed us to explore these themes in greater detail. Funding the material costs of creating our introductory video which explores ecology through its microscopic landscapes to capture the nuances of the polarised environment.
Megan Watson
I’m Inspired predominantly by Surrealism and Herbalism concepts, my work explores how traditional techniques can coalesce modernly. In this project, I converted herbalism practices, concepts, and history into design methods. I designed and made a chaise lounge, which then birthed a digital 3D atmosphere.
“The chair sinks, drips, oozes, pollinates, sings and lights up the space around it. Creating, belonging, and becoming a part of it.
Here we have an atmosphere, it's warm with a soft breeze that clears your thoughts and carries the light with it. There are fields and growing hills of lavender that chase still crystal lakes, and sounds that fill the air and settle in shells. “
The Tom Fund award went towards my materials cost, for the chaise lounge and the large hand-embroidered upholstered section.
Napat Chinweerapunt
The Anti Clown Clown Club is a project that explores a commonly misunderstood childhood character - Clowns. I once believed that clowns are nothing but mischievous, creepy and uncanny beings, until I got to see them up close. Not only so, I decided to learn how to be a clown. By applying into an intensive clowning course, thanks to the support from Tom Fund, I was able to fully understand what it means to be a clown and what they represent. This new exciting understanding and view of clowning completely changed the direction of my project which soon came alive as I applied the framework and philosophy of clowning into my design. The final outcome of the project is a prototype of an immersive experience inside the ‘red nose’ which guides the participators through a meditative journey to self-awareness, and to unlock their inner clowns. By performing awkward movements and gestures, participators are actively shedding their ego, their social masks and expectations as they go through the series of instructions. The experience hopes to unlock a sense of freedom and nativity within the participants - The strength to fall and the strength to be perceived as stupid.