Let the brain heal, from its birth you peel, though the veins you spill, there’s hope but still.
I’m writing this the day after the show, the first time I got to sleep properly in weeks. I had about 10 hours sleep in 6 days leading up to the show. I would have never thought or believed that this would be possible, but with my tutor from Westminster and good friend Stephanie Cooper, sending a group of her Saint Martins FDM students to help me from Wednesday, together, we bought the collection to life.
Working away on my own at my studio in Sarabande Tottenham, the collection came out slower than normal in a handful of weeks. I was troubled deeply with the current deterioration of humanity and earth, and was looking inside to pull out some hope.
What came was really my most personal and most emotional work since starting. Melanchronic Mountain, loosely set in heaven, the idea that today, as a generation, we are experiencing a tremendous amount of hardship, a shared endurance of pain and a worldwide holt in peace and the right to be free.
Paolo Carzana
To imagine the deepest darkest trek, up the mountain, through the storm, enduring the obstacles we face, carrying the pain in our bones we have inherited, passed the clouds and up to the top, where the light shines bright and you can be free.
I was thinking a lot about the acceptance of ourselves at one persons place in their lives. To me, I dreamt to leave Cardiff and move to London to find people like myself and to be able to express and grow and change.
Years on, I realise, like many others, everything about where I am from, who I am, gave me the entire structure of myself. I’m proud to be a working class son, I am proud to have come from a family of manual workers, I am proud of my Welsh and Italian roots. And those roots we carry, this feeling, became the starting point for the collection. Like the trees in a mountain, roots are inherited in us, our pain we inherit is eternal, the steps we take and the dreams we carry, Melanchronic Mountain.
I thought a lot about my Bampi, who was a welder in Cardiff Bay fixing the boats decades ago. My mum told me the story last year of how he would often come home blinded by the metal and would be blindfolded for a week or so. This endurance of strength carried me through the collection, the colour palette becomes much more concentrated than ever before, thinking about this touch of workmanship from my Bampi represented in the speckles and hand process of the dyeing, the browns, the subtle blues and greens, climbing through the mountain amongst the dirt amongst the mud amongst the grass amongst the water.
A make up of aloe vera fibre jackets, rose petal fibre shirts, orange fibre underwear and eucalyptus fibre shorts made up a number of the fabrics woven into the collection, before being dyed and crafted with, black walnut creating browns, cutch creating oranges, sappanwood to create reds and turmeric and indigo to create greens, along with a large number more of plant ingredients.
Peace silk and Organic cotton twill waxed with a mix of soya and candelilla wax, creating rock like structures within the path to the mountain, protectors to us.
The clothes, I constructed, pattern cut, draped, worked 2d and 3d together, to craft around the body, focusing on form, sensual to the body and then an explosion in silhouette.
My team, Nasir Mazhar, Patricia Villirillo, Troy Fearn, Claire Grech, Crystabel Riley and Katie Collins, encouraged and bought to life the journey from darkness in to the light, balancing the strength, bringing the fragility, encapsulating the romance.
I dedicate this collection to one of the men of my life, we lost some years ago, and I know he is looking down on Melanchronic Mountain even higher up, watching over me, my mum’s dad, my nan’s husband, my Bampi.
Melanchronic Mountain List of fabrics
Aloe Vera Fibre
Orange Fibre
Eucalyptus Fibre
Rose Petal Fibre
Organic cotton muslin Organic cotton twill
Organic cotton canvas Peace silk organza
Deadstock silk dupion
Antique cotton gauze
Deadstock boiled Wool
Deadstock Japanese Denim
Antique Japanese silk chiffon
Hemp Jersey
Bamboo Jersey
Antique Welsh quilt
Organic cotton wadding
Peace silk voile
Linen
Banana fibre sınamay
Melanchronic Mountain List of dyes
Black Walnut
Madder
Gallant
Cutch
Indigo
Greenweed
Himalayan Rhubarb
Annatto orange
Wild cherry bark
Sappanwood
Turmeric
Brazilwood
White onion skins
Black tea
Orange spice
Hibiscus
Buckthorn Berries
Apple wood
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@paolocarzana
paolocarzana.com
With love,
FWO
