V O G U E | Diaspora: wearable art

Fusing photographic art with fashion, award-winning British artist Gemma Land draws inspiration from architecture, using symmetry to create impossible structures and hallucinogenic patterns. Her aesthetic lies between the romantic and gothic, with stunning imagery. Gemma is keen to push the boundaries of photographic print in fashion and exhibit her artwork in galleries around the world.

Gemma Land's first collection, Bourgeois Utopias, features digitally printed black-and-white images of English suburban houses. Her second collection of print silk scarves is a series of monochrome and color prints of London's much-loved Strawberry Hill House. Printed with the finest quality and hand finished in Britain, the Strawberry Hill collection features Land's unique style, fusing her photographic art with the function of scarves.

Gemma Land is one to watch: she has won recently the Wolf & Badger Graduate Design award and she was shortlisted at the 2011 Fashioning The Future Awards.

For the Strawberry Hill collection, the artist collaborated with film-maker Xu Ming Long Tong to create a set of images inspired by Land's designing methods. The results are these stunning metamorphic shapes.

Metamorphosis

Courtesy Gemma Land

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Why should we live if we must die? It is one of the questions Danish artist Nikoline Liv Andersen puts us in this exhibition. With a plethora of bodies, thick fabrics, flowers and fruits, life's transience is reflected upon, man in defense against death and the body in decomposition. Through baroque vanitas-settings and references to the myth of Sisyphus - society's eternal quest for financial abundance in a life that undoubtedly lose all worldliness at the end - the project expresses a life without meaning that will inevitably end.

Also on exhibit is the project The Dance of the Deaf and Dumb Eye where Nikoline Liv Andersen examines the theory of the classic Japanese monkeys that naively shut themselves out of the world by not seeing, not hearing and not speaking. Monkeys housed in wigs a la Marie Antoinette and clothing sculptures are visualized through a counterpart to the French court of Louis XVI, whose excessive exuberance and poor communication between nobility and the people led to the French Revolution. The monkeys symbolize today's blind consumer.

Nikoline Liv Andersen graduated as a fashion designer from the Danish Design School in 2006. She works in the borderland between fashion and art, and her unique creations are made of materials such as fur and plastic. She lives and works in Copenhagen.
" Since I was little, I had an endless fascination with aesthetic and visual story telling. My heart is beating and my fingers are itching to dress and dress up. I see it as a duty and a great motivation to push the borders of what you are able to wear and not to dwell in the land of compromises where existing target groups are being pleased."
~~ Nikoline Liv Andersen

The exhibition presents two new installations of textile works and a selection of past creations. "Slowly Seeping through my Hands" is currently on view at Horsens Kunstmuseum in Denmark.

The Dance of the Deaf and Dumb Eye by Nikoline Liv Andersen

Photos by Nicky de Silva