Our latest newsletter and press articles

July 2019

Raising the Baa winners’ presentations

Our Raising the Baa 2018 winners, Cody Berkahn (Product Design) and Luis Alonso Sandoval Gomez (Creative Technologies), presented their final work to the judging panel earlier this month.

Both students were awarded $5,000 each, courtesy of the Wool Research Organisation of New Zealand, to develop their innovative concepts using strong wool.

Cody’s ‘Lanitium’ project focused on the use of knitted wool sleeves, which form the outer skin of mass-producible flat-packed wooden framed lighting. ‘The use of organic materials makes the product fully biodegradable’, says Cody.

Alonso, who teamed up with fellow Creative Technologist, Charlotte Pryce-Jones, developed a prototype moulded strong wool/bio-plastic chair and is keen to partner with a commercial business to take his idea to the next level.

^{Cody Berkahn (left) and Luis Alonso Sandoval Gomez (right) present their final work to the judging panel}

AUT Students short-listed for International Design Competition

Three Textile Design students have had their work selected to represent AUT in the Society of Dyers and Colourists (SDC) colour competition. The International Design Competition is one of the SDC’s annual flagship events, engaging with hundreds of students, universities and designers globally. The competition helps entrants develop their understanding of colour and the challenges around sustainability in the textile supply chain.

The theme for 2019 is ‘colour and nature’ and is sponsored by the Colour Atlas by Archroma®.

The three students competing in the Australia/New Zealand heat are Emma Long, Kate Whittaker and Megan Hawke. Emma’s concept is around wool fibres and their naturally smart abilities and uses digitally printed woven merino in conjunction with felted wool to achieve a new material. Kate’s ideas are inspired by zero waste garment pattern cutting and using the potential of digitally printed textiles. Megan also used the Feltloom as her colour design tool to upcycle textiles using wool to produce new colourways.

Read more about the competition

^{Shortlisted SDC competition entries by Emma Long (left), Kate Whittaker (centre) and Megan Hawke (right)}

Textile research on show in Madrid

AUT Lecturer, Dr Donna Cleveland, has had her textile work entitled ‘Transformational cloth: sensing environmental changes’ accepted into the 8^th World Textile Art Organization’s biennial of contemporary textile art ‘Sustainable City – Madrid 2019’.

The exhibition opens on 17 September at the Centro Arte Complutense and the work will be exhibited in the large format outdoor section. The interactive textile senses environmental changes and indicates these to the user by transforming colour and transparency. When the temperature rises above 25 degrees C, the pigment changes slowly from coloured to transparent with beautiful colour variations in the process. When raining, as the white print becomes wet, the ink changes states. You can interact with the piece by moving the screens around to shade different prints from the sunlight. The artwork was developed from photographs of microscopic cross-sections of New Zealand plants.

Read more

^{Environmental sensory textiles by Donna Cleveland}

Short courses and Workshops

Our next round of short courses and workshops begins at the end of August with our new 3D Visualisation and Concept development workshop being run over the weekend of 31 August – 1 September. The courses and workshops are an ideal way to upskill in a range of textile-related fields with minimal time investment. Our full programme is as follows:

• 31 Aug – 1 Sep
  3D Visualisation and Concept Development
• 5 – 6 Sep:
  Introduction to Textiles
• 5 – 6 Sep:
  Photoshop Basics for Textile Design
• 12- 13 Sep:
  Digital Textile Design – Repeating Patterns
• 12 – 13 Sep:
  International Textile Development and Sourcing
• 21 – 22 Sep:
  Knitwear Design
• 5 – 6 December:
  E-Textiles

Read more and register here