Melanie Bowles | TED Research Blog

The Geometrics exhibition

17 April 2013

TED member Melanie Bowles of the People’s Print will be exhibiting her work alongside other eminent textile designers at The Geometrics exhibition. Melanie has recently launched a new series of e-books – tutorials to develop digital print designs and that can be accessed through her website.

The Geometrics collective is made up of diverse artists, designers and researchers, all of whom trained in textile design and who continue to drive forward the geometric form inherent in their original study. Supported by Kingsgate Workshops Trust and the Slow Textiles Group, they publish new work, research and thinking on geometric structures.

The private view is on 19th April (6pm-9pm) and the exhibition runs from 20th April – 5th May at the Kingsgate Gallery, 110-116 Kingsgate Road, London NW6 2JG. More about the Symposium programme and events can be found here.

New BA Textile Design course website

7 November 2012

BA Textile Design course director Caryn Simonson and senior lecturer Melanie Bowles have set up a new website for the BA Textile Design course at Chelsea College of Art & Design. Acting as a newsletter for the course’s projects, collaborations and external events, the new website houses a blog for news on exhibitions, alumni and also the degree shows and stage two shows, plus links to other online resources. For a full view on the BA Textile Design Course please follow this link.

Every print tells a story

26 June 2012

The People’s Print are engaging with BA Textile Design students at Chelsea to spread the word about their designs and inspirations. ‘Every print tells a story’ is developed to create insight behind print designer’s work.

The first of a series of interviews is with Naomi Whitehead. She is inspired by the motoring industry, chemistry labs and crystal structures. With her interest in new scientific textiles, she has explored BioResins for being an eco-friendly material already used in the automotive industry. We loved her work at the degree show and wish her well as she graduates.

Check out TED member Melanie Bowles‘s website.

E-co textiles

28 May 2011

DIY mania was in action last weekend at the Future Everything Craft event in Manchester, with Mel Bowles and Jen Ballie introducing audiences to their co-design textile/fashion projects.

Also at the event were projects including Pics to Knits a web based project which allows a user to convert any image to a knitting pattern which forms a blanket or throw and David Littler’s sampler-cultureclash an international collective of sound artists, DJ’s, embroiderers, textile designers, performance poets, machine hackers and dancers who are exploring the connections between textiles and sound and the cultures of embroidery and DJ-ing.

Textiles & Co Design at TED

11 May 2011

TED member Mel Bowles and PhD student Jen Ballie are both going to be at the Future Everything event this weekend in Manchester.

Mel will be running her workshop ‘The Peoples Print: the empowerment of the consumer through Digital Textile Design’, where participants will be encouraged to create their own digital textile print.

Jen Ballie will be presenting her interactive workshop called The Scarf Project, where you will be encouraged to rip and mix past and present fashion trends to make and style your own bespoke scarf.

Slow/Fast becomes a trend

15 February 2011

Last autumn, TED Members Melanie Bowles and Emma Neuberg ran their Slow/Fast workshops at the V & A, where participants were encouraged to explore both hand and digital approaches to textile making. The course was awarded the ‘Best Creative Course’ in 2010 by the participants and was quite ground breaking in it’s approach.

Mel, Emma and their project has now been written up in Stylus.com, by Chelsea alumni Alsion Gough who works for this trends forecasting website, exploring what the Slow movement means for the textile and fashion industry.

The co-design element of the new Slow approaches is key, as Alison explains, “Further removing brand controls, open sourcing and shared knowledge is crucial for the slow movement and, as the slow textiles group strives towards an empowerment of the consumer, the role of digital and downloadable is gaining momentum…”.