Unconsummated Affection

  • Ching Shen

This is a fashion and textile design project with the concept of texturising emotion. The emotion 'love' is communicated through hand-made woven and knitted textiles.

Emotions are abstract.
People have different interpretation toward emotions. Take colour of emotions as an example, people see yellow and orange as happy colours; black and red represent anger; green is peaceful and so on. This is how most people describe emotions; however human emotions are complicated and cannot be measured just by colours. There are textures and temperatures in emotions even though they are rather abstract. Hence I had this idea to explore if emotions could be demonstrated through textiles.
Can emotions be texturised?
Love is the chosen emotion in this project.
Love is a strong feeling of affection, attachment, obsession and attraction to others. There are two sides of love. One side is romantic, comfortable and pinky love that we are familiar with and the other side is the shadowy part of love that is twisted, dark and anxious.
The reason why there is dark side of love is that it is built up from previous unpleasant experience and yearning for stable and comfortable relationship with loved ones. That is to say, as people feel love, they are actually experiencing more feelings than just simply satisfying one affectionate emotion.
Sometimes hate dresses up as love –
the wolf in sheep’s clothing,
menacing either the beloved or the self.
-Jane G. Goldberg