“I just want people to doodle” Molly Goddard says about her current exhibition “Things I Like” on show at NOW Gallery, London. With 400 meters of tulle, Goddard has installed six dresses that float above visitors’ heads in the gallery’s atrium. Constructed with an intricate pulley system, the public is invited to embroider on the dresses themselves. As their composition gets moved around to different areas of the gallery throughout the show, “Things I Like” results in an interchangeable communally made artwork.
Known across the UK and worldwide, Goddard graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2012 and has since developed a crisp and minimalist collection of clothes, known especially for her playful tulle party dresses. Drawing on traditional textile techniques she uses crocheting, pleating and smocking to create her looks which have strutted up and down many a catwalk during the last five years of London Fashion Week. Needles to say Goddard is a hot designer right now—this exhibition in fact was her own answer to a retrospective. For that she considers her career too young.
Hoping that this exhibition will attract a particularly young audience, Goddard wants her installation to encourage young people to get involved in textiles; to take up embroidery and traditional craft techniques that might stay with them throughout their lives. What she didn’t want was to create yet another “idolised fashion piece”. This exhibition is about embracing a sense of community and realising our shared textile heritage today. “I can’t wait to see the stories which will be told through embroidery” says Goddard, “and to witness what skills people have or manage to discover when visiting the exhibition.”
Whether a textiles student or an office worker taking a break from the daily grind, a whole family or a lone gallery-goer, “What I Like” is designed to offer the public space to focus on materials, and to take part in a story of fabric drawn from many helping hands. Closing soon on the 22nd of February, we recommend you go and make your mark.
http://nowgallery.co.uk/exhibitions/whatilike/
www.mollygoddard.com
http://www.itsnicethat.com/news/designer-molly-goddards-first-art-installation-opens-at-now-gallery-041116
