Victoria Petitjean

Victoria Petitjean is a Print and Surface designer, putting narratives at the forefront of her practice. She tends to create highly textured work, drawn from her direct environment and her impression of it. Feeding a penchant for new processes, her work fuses digital explorations and practical textile development.

Graduated from both Textile Design and Fine Arts prior to her study at the RCA, she tends to ignore separation between disciplines and pushes their walls to make space for one big party.

As a result, she connected with the fashion industry and worked for renowned brands such as Proenza Schouler and Givenchy, but also collaborated with contemporary artists, notably French artist Elise Morin, and engaged herself in curatorial projects.

RESURFACE // CITY DIGGER

The earth surface has been carved out for millennia in the hunt for resources to satisfy industrial greed. Human capacity for metals was such that by 2080 the largest metal reserve will be above ground, found in our very own cities and manufactured habitat. Our buildings are now seen as 'urban mines'.

Drawn by this poetic yet alarming phenomenon, I decided to investigate the shifting of this material's source and excavating ways of putting myself in the character of a 'city digger'.

Could the source of an object's material nature its aesthetic and foster an emotional connection with its possessor? Through gritty textures and a sense of present-time epigraphy, the re-smelted scrapped aluminum is telling its material story.

The result is a series of speculative renders, digitally crafted jewelleries. Each one of them is drawn from a particular scene from the neighbourhood of Whitechapel, where I used to live. They are battered rings, quite primitive, serving as reminders of our connection with the environment we inhabit.