Designer Dreaming Award, sponsored by Stephanie Reynolds - AUD$1000.
Voorpostel, Derek (AUS) ‘Summer’, (Dress for Janice)
ABOUT THE PIECE
The dress is an homage to Derek’s wife Janice.
Featuring visual motifs of butterflies and flowers, the work evokes tranquil summer days, with a touch of romance.
MATERIALS and TECHNIQUE
Moulds are made from pulped tissue and recycled office paper. The paper is pulped with PVA glue at less than 10% per volume. It is then pressed under pressure into moulds of flowers and butterflies. Next in the assembly line, they are dried and have the excess paper removed and refined into the final shape as an individual sculpture.
A total of fourteen sculptures made from modelling clay for developing of silicon moulds. From these moulds six different types of flowers and one butterfly were chosen to construct the garment.
The butterflies are hand panted with water colour and will be assembled for the hat.
The flower sculptures will be joined together with millinery elastic to form the fabric of the dress.
The piece is about a celebration of summer, flowers and butterflies.
The concept is to make a summer outfit for “Janice.”
In excess of 1000 small sculptures were pressed and released. All had to be tidied up by hand.
One hundred and fifty butterflies were meticulously painted with acrylics.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Since the mid-1990’s, Derek has been exploring the world of fibre arts, primarily batik and shibori. He has had an on-going fascination with resist dying, especially as it is practised in explore Indonesia and Japan. Whilst he has been inspired by inspired by what he has been shown and taught by master artists of traditional methods, “What I have loved most is to push the boundaries of the traditional to respectfully create my own stories of modern mythology.”
Derek has also discovered a love of the medium of paper. In 2022, Derek was awarded the Tasmanian Hearing and Implant Centre, Dr Kellie Walker’s Encouragement Award for his piece In Honour of Musashi. “It has been a revelation. The discipline of paper pulping and paper sculpting has, somewhat just emerged. It allows me to bring a finer skill set of the many crafts I have honed over the years. I have been sculpting paper, from embossing flat sheets of paper pulp with ‘chaps’ to press release moulds.”
This experimentation and experience led to the design and development of his 2024 work ‘Summer’, (Dress for Janice)