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