Fashion and Textile students’ work displayed at Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange
12 February 2025
Students across Falmouth’s Fashion & Textiles Institute have been selected to have their work featured in a new exhibition, entitled Social Fabric, at Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange.
The textile-based exhibition shares art that revalues old wisdoms and techniques by using traditional textile skills with a fresh perspective. Shown across both galleries, the exhibition will be available to explore until 26th April 2025.
The collaboration began when students shared their work in a pop-up exhibition at Falmouth’s Fashion & Textiles Institute, where they presented projects in response to a task set in the first-year module ‘Belonging’. The module, which encourages students to build a progressive understanding of the ethical language of fashion, set a brief based on ‘Fashion Fictions’. Students were tasked to imagine, explore, and enact alternative fashion worlds, using their creativity to create an artifact from this imagined space. Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange curator, Cat Gibbard, selected student art from the showcase to display as part of the Social Fabric exhibition.
When asked for her perspective on the students’ work, exhibit curator Cat Gibbard said: “The responses from the students have been brilliant. They challenge and provoke thought, adding another layer to the themes of the exhibition. I also love the breadth of the specialisms amongst the student’s work, with pieces from students who study Fashion Marketing to Textile Design to Fashion Styling to Art Design.”
Speaking on the project itself, Fashion Marketing BA(Hons) student Louis Merchant said: “I found the project allowed me to step back and explore what ethical practice looks like in my discipline while also allowing me to experiment with different creative mediums.”
“The ‘Fashion Fictions’ project made it a challenge to find where fashion marketing sits in an alien and imagined space, but it enabled me to draw inspiration from unorthodox cultural aspects, and to think more broadly.”
Fellow Fashion Marketing student Willem Curtin added: “I found the brief [to create our own fictional world to base our work around] added a challenge that pushed my creative ability to develop my final work. I thought about the situation my fictional people would be experiencing, and the passion they would have put into artifacts, to create an authentic product that represents their struggles.”
“It was refreshing to create a product that doesn’t relate to our society but an imagined one. It encouraged me to take inspiration from historical events to develop an outcome that represented the lives of people who have no relation to my own life.”
The exhibition is currently available to see at both Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, from Tuesday-Saturday, until 26th April 2025.
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