Ingrid Thompson

Zazz Garden

Zazz Garden is a mixed media installation featuring knitted jumper-sculptures, digital embroideries and found  objects set in a cardboard and multi coloured tape landscape, accompanied by photo evidence of zazziness in wacky storefronts, mass-produced hilarity, and commercial slippages. Zazz Garden is a material styling job, seeking to make things scream at you.

This body of work documents learning how to knit, explorations of materiality, and Roland Barthes’s concept of The Neutral through knitted jumper-sculptures and an accompanying illustrated album. It embodies my on-going search for the nuance - the shimmer that catches the eye, in materials, found objects, mass-produced hilarity, commercial slippages and wacky storefronts. As a material stylist, my engagement with fashion and surfaces is epitomized by Barthes imagined rule of the Neutral, which seeks to “disseminate intelligent stuff, as though between the lines of a flat, dumb fabric”.

Through the foil of fashion, I attempt to outplay the arrogance of paradigms rooted in distinct knowledge domains and practices by operating in the shadowy space between them, by means of juxtapositions, strange translations and by negotiating technical limitations.

My approach to materials and making questions the sovereignty of utility in design processes with regards to creative agency and its effect on the possibility to carve out a space for experimentation and failure. In order to bring out the spellbinding thingness of things, material styling demands total freedom