An Experimental Touch
Published
By
jesse
Ilias Fotopoulos has returned to Australia after impressing the crowds at 100% Design Tokyo with his unconventional wallpapers and textiles.
The artist-maker began his tactile love affair when he felt the velvet of his mother’s hand-worked garments as a child and developed a sensitivity that was to nurture his later works, including the collaborative ‘Listen and Record’.
Transposing short stories composed by a close Japanese friend, Ilias conceived a design for Braille wallpaper that creates an inextricable link between aesthetic and function, deriving its patterns from the stories themselves.
His series are a fusion of experiments and studies of natural geometries, the process beginning with inspiration from stimuli, followed by a technical journey on textile, paper or a garment, often with the application of lacquers, heat and acids.
With confidence that allows him to relinquish control, Ilias embraces trial and error, chance and accident, the end result often being quite different to the imagined visual and tactile outcome.
info@ilias.com.au
www.ilias.com.au
Related Articles
Events
A rollicking good story with Richards Stanisich and Royal Oak Floors
Jonathan Richards and Kirsten Stanisich discussed practice, design process and the business of running a studio at a live audience event hosted by Royal Oak Floors in Sydney.
Events
Indesign x Wilkhahn: Melbourne, where are you working?
Our latest collaboration saw a range of designers come together at Wilkhahn’s Melbourne showroom for a discussion on the workplace dynamics specific to the Victorian capital.
Events
“A journey into a whole new material world”: Plant Life at the NGV
Curator Ewan McEoin tells us about the NGV’s new exhibition on plant-based materials as alternatives to plastics, synthetic materials and other non-renewable resources.
Events
The inaugural Coastal Design Assembly is about to make landfall in Sydney
Sophie Lanigan, organiser of a new event centring on Sydney’s relationship to water, tells us what the event’s all about, who it’s for and why it matters today.