The use of print throughout Frankie Dean’s collection is based on the Siamese fighting fish. Their territorial behaviour provided a parallel to how people assert their possession of space exterior to themselves and circle around each other in the same way as the Siamese fighting fish do when they are about to attack. Each drawing is layered with both straight and tape lines that expresses an externalisation of presence in space.
Dean explores how lines travel around the body with a sense of volume and movement. By using expansive dimensions and sculpting his fabric manipulations would move around the body. She would observe the territorial, confrontational and conflicted behaviour of human interaction and use this as an abstract symbol when expressing externalisation of our presence in space outside of ourselves.
Evolving from the organic lines of the spiralling Siamese Fighter Fish the geometric lines of varying width and colours interrupting the prints came from a printing glitch, which in fact provided a starting point for Frankie Dean’s silhouette development. Her lineament complimented and provided a canvas for his prints to travel in an uninterrupted continuum of both linear and organic lines across the human form.
Having looked at the sculptability of three-dimensional line and structure, Frankie wanted his silhouettes to define the waist and create a tulip shape in the area above the natural hip line but below the waist in response to the helical spirals.
By doing this, Frankie’s designs translated an elegant sense of exaggerated yet understated and unsexualised femininity giving the female figure a sculptured presence; both expressive and dynamic yet controlled and contained.
