Vivian Ge’s graduate collection ‘Here’s the Garden’ took inspiration from role of gardens as a healing space and barrier. The colour palette comes from the garden where she collected flowers, leaves and fruits to dye her yarns and fabrics. She found that colours of natural dyes turned out very soft, which brought feelings of warmth and healing.
Influenced by the artwork of Cy Twombly, Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh, Vivian illustrated from garden photos her took across the world, painting in abstract style to create an impression of garden. Instead of oil painting, she chose to use water colours to create a sense of lightness, clear and tranquility. To build environments which offer comfort and healing, Vivian used series of green, along with blue green, as the main colours in the space. With its qualities of healing, tranquil, refreshing, quiet and natural, it provides a soft and relaxing environment which is good for meditation and introspection.
Inspired by the shape of boundaries in garden design, Vivian developed a series of forms, using them to buffer interactions. Counterintuitively, she set up boundaries between people and created the healing journey via textile, in order to provide a way of relieving negative feelings such as loneliness, depression and anxiety — not by seeking out sympathy from others through language, but by returning to nature and using introspection and distance to better maintain social relationships as we integrate into society.
In order to gain better understanding of the space and communicating her concept, she converted her physical materials to digital materials and applied them on models of her soft furnishings by using own-build scanner and 3D softwares (Cinema 4D, Substance Designer and Substance Painter). Vivian’s textile garden is designed for healing therapy and spiritual well-being. Not everyone can visit a garden whenever they want. Obstacles can be natural such as bad weather, societal if due to work or school, or irresistible when we are not able to leave the house (like lockdown). Vivian aim to bring the experience of the garden inside, to overcome any obstacles for visiting a physical garden, and to help provide the healing space for us to reconnect with each other and and adapt to a post-Covid world once again.
