Our Story
Surface Tension is a collaboration between
Rosie Broadhead and Wilson Oryema
Skin
Skin, a biological surface, is the barrier between the self and the world. The complex exterior and semipermeable membrane interact with our biology and the environment. Yet, surface has often been overlooked in the quest for depth and truth.
The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly redefined our lives, from how we dress to our values in life, work, travel and play. With our long-established patterns being challenged we are given the time and opportunity to reflect upon our relationship with our environment, identities and intentions. With a virus that shifts our perspective to the barrier between us and the world around us, we ask how can the materials that we wear or interact with can offer both protection and improve our wellbeing?
Fashion, or the business of clothing, hasn’t always been designed with our ever-changing circumstances and new technologies in mind. However, this doesn’t mean that the potential is not there. Today, there is an opportunity and a responsibility to rethink the surfaces that surround us, with the physical, environmental and cultural implications at the centre of design.
The Exhibition
Surface Tension is a digital exhibition, event, and platform devoted to realising the potential materials can have on the human body and surrounding environment across varied creative disciplines. We chose digital or 3D design to challenge the surface and depth binary as these virtual processes allow designers to conceive and produce more complex objects.
The exhibition will feature submissions from various material designers, artists, fashion designers, architects, and scientists. The works focus on materials which have the intended effect of protecting, sustaining or improving the function of the human body. From Final Frontier Design’s Mechanical Counter-Pressure gloves for NASA, to potential of the anti-viral properties of seaweed by Clean Valley, and clothing brand By Borre exhibits their open-source tool for designers to create sustainably.
This exhibition is curated to host both speculative materials concepts and projects which are currently on the market or in the process of being manufactured. While using this as a showcase for what materials are available, this will also be intended to accelerate progress of the industry, for a future where the body and surface are considered simultaneously.