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| Image © Peter Downton |
Tania Spława-Neyman is a fashion practitioner and sessional lecturer within the School of Fashion and Textiles, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She has recently completed a PhD by project within RMIT’s School of Architecture and Design titled Care Making: Practices of gleaning, using and future fashioning. This practice-based research explores making that is carefully attuned to the inherent qualities of materials encountered in an everyday domestic setting, affording a deep understanding of and caring for the life of these materials. This encompasses the materials’ past and potential future lives, and the interactions between these material lives, the researcher’s own life and own acts of making.
Gleaning is explored as a system for reconceptualising waste as remnants, with its own unique, embedded potential. This affords a closed loop approach, and whilst physical remnants are gleaned, gleaning of the self is performed through the revival of disused skills in making and design. The enquiry addresses both problems of waste and overabundance, working towards creating a balanced ecology of objects that reshapes professional design and everyday living practices.
