In collaboration with:
Rowena Liangru Lu
Jake Lambert
Senyuan Zhang
‘INFLATION’ was part of our short-term Unit 3 project at the Royal College of Art, for which the brief directed us to investigate the area of South West London, engage with the community and find some of the major particularities of this area of London.
Richmond is currently the area of London most populated by Ukrainian refugees. We interacted with the Vineyard Community Church, which is working hard to provide accommodation and support to Ukrainian refugees. Through the conversations we learned that the refugees miss things from their former homeland that they could not bring with them to England during their flight from the war. Therefore, our question was how we could bring those missing items back into the life of the refugees.
The project contains elements of experimentation with digital scanning to capture
The body of this work is inspired by the tiles of a Ukrainian tile stove that the owners of a Ukrainian restaurant in London managed to move a couple of years ago, to bring an element of their former home into their new environment. We created a metal stamp from the outline of the tiles, that we could heat up in the oven and press onto sheets of PVC plastic to have the imprint on our inflatable fabric. Through this process, we created a number of these tiled sheets, that we later turned into a series of lamps.
