Vivian Ge
About
Vivian Ge is a textile designer specialising in print. With a BA from Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, she pursued her MA at Royal College of Art. Vivian devotes herself to designing patterns and materials in both the physical and virtual worlds. With a strong interest in space, her works focus on the sensory experience conveyed by textiles and she has a passion for exploring how sensibility can be provoked by colours, patterns and surfaces.
Exhibitions
New Designers, London, 2018
Première Vision Designs, Paris, 2018
Première Vision Designs, Paris, 2017
Awards
'Glass in a Connected World' NSG HACKATHON Second Prize 2019
Degree Details
Statement
Reconnect // Here's the Garden
The transition from traditional to modern society has brought with it the hard-to-confess problem of loneliness. The arrival of Covid-19 has exacerbated this as public health restrictions aggravate urban isolation and mental illness.
So how do we connect with others, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy?
‘Here is the Garden’ project took inspiration from the role of gardens as a healing space and barrier. The work patrols the space between people and the natural landscape, conducting an investigation into closeness and distance, intimacy and estrangement.
The origin of the word ‘Garden’ comes from the Middle English, gardyn, and the high German, gart, meaning “enclosure.” The word implies that a garden is a place with edges and boundaries. But alongside the cultural hallmarks of innocence, tranquillity and beauty, the garden is also a place for pleasure and protection. Vivian’s intention is to bring the garden outside inside and to cultivate a space for collective healing in the city— a tactile and visual garden, as the artistic and poetic resistance of life to the fragmentation of society and the rigidity of science and technology.
From The Garden
Counterintuitively, I set up boundaries between people and created the healing journey from loneliness via textile, in order to provide a way of relieving loneliness — not by seeking out sympathy from others through language, but by returning to nature and using introspection and distance to better maintain social relationships as we integrate into society.
Medium: Watercolours ; Mixed Media
Here's The Garden
Medium: wool; silk; cotton; linen
The Interior Garden
The interior garden can kindle the journey of self-healing in private spaces, as well as vaster public spaces like galleries in the city centre, such as the Piccadilly Circus Soft Opening Gallery, as a common resting space.
For visualisation, I converted my physical materials to digital materials, which can be used in the virtual world as well.
Medium: Cinema 4D; Substance Designer; Substance Painter; Arnold Render