the Dutch word “los” can mean “loose,” “detached,” or “not fixed.”
My inspiration for this project comes from the following ANECDOTE: “After spending my first twenty years with my parents, brother, and sister, the moment came when I took the step towards more independence. My parents saw a new future for themselves in Sweden and moved there in the summer of ’23. I stayed in the Netherlands where i was born. This step felt like a big adventure I had to embark on. The start of my graduation project felt like the right and perfect moment to begin my journey of discovering ‘my being.’ In this change, the theme ‘Los, searching for home’ is woven through this phase of my life, in which I physically distance myself from familiar and comforting patterns, and in doing so, I get to find my own way.”
Research in this case starts within myself
- what is my experience?
- what do i want to tell my audience?
- Do I design a collection or a story?
The process started with writing about what some of these people meant to me. I interviewed family members and friends about their feelings of home. From these interviews, I created imaginative poetry. I love poetry because it conveys emotions in words. The interviews with family members that inspired me the most were turned into poems.
And the objects they described to make them feel at home i made into printable objects some of those you can see downbelow:
I used edited images in a cyanotype graphic design process to dye multiple skirts that tell my relatives’ stories. I chose skirts because they effectively display a lot of information and have a movement that resembles the poems I wrote earlier. I initially made some samples, and the results are shown below.
I liked the ‘blueprint’ style of the printing technique because it shows how memories shape people’s lives, similar to how a blueprint explains how a product works. For the tops of the design for the story i made a moodboard to represent each of my family members personalities.
some of the moodboards about the people i wanted to design a Top for:
eventually those became designs
To deepen the designs and the story, I wanted to make a movie and a photoshoot to really capture the essence of the stories these people told me and to expose my project to the public.
You can see the script down below as well as a moodboard and a photoshoot
screenplay:
runedebeer.com 