It is Design Week/Month in Toronto and there is buzz everywhere from Toronto Design Offsite, Interior Design Show to DO Design. My busy schedule doesn’t allow me to see all the awesome exhibitions that are out there, I am seeing a few but there is no way I can catch up with the buzz. However, this energy always makes me look at January as Design Consciousness month and it is a perfect timing as I am reflecting on life and setting the threading theme for the year.
I am looking around me to get a better idea of what my design diet consist of. I don’t have much expertise in the field except for great appreciation of good solid design and having developed an eye or taste for it (in certain areas). I have become more and more focused and selective about what I surround myself with. I am a sucker for clean, simple, minimal and functional objects. I don’t have space in my home nor my brain (more so than my home) to spend it on managing stuff. And still I find most of my non-work time is spent in the department of Stuff Management. To get myself out of the constant state of de-cluttering, I am constantly changing my consumption habits and I am gravitating more and more to implementing good design in every aspect of life. Even my wardrobe is moving more towards becoming a capsule closet filled with essentials. I have been sticking to a very minimal colour palette of black , white and grey with a pop of colour as a rule of thumb for everything for quite some time now. My focus over the years has shifted to quality vs. quantity. It has been liberating and efficient and I am becoming even stricter with it. This is a wave everywhere (or maybe in some areas trendy but one of those good trends) and it is a good way of living. To do more with less! It is hard but it is so good if I can stick to it.
As you have seen over the past year, this thinking has trickled into my collage work and has changed it drastically. In the research phase I took on myself, I aimed to reduce and minimize my previously dense collage explorations to essential, minimal forms, lines and characters and try to take the attention to simplicity of small fragments. It has been a good practice.
Since some of those works are at the Interior Design Show this week and to pay tribute to the Design week/month and what I have been thinking, I thought to attempt to minimize the work even further and delve deeper in to the cut-out forms and lines.
The palette is black, white and grey. My favourite is the first one with the felt.
