Cyclical Material

The cyclical capabilities of a material is revealed by how it can be broken down and continually used. I explored this concept by pushing my paper clothing into more iterations and seeing if it was possible to bring them back to their original base material.

First, I wanted to bring back the blank canvas that is paper by adding a variety of embellishments that challenge the guidelines I had implemented when creating the dresses originally.

Second, I wanted to break down the dresses back to the raw material to then re-create sheets of paper, and then use the new sheets to draw the original sketches of the dresses.

In theory, this cycle could continue forever by making dresses from the paper and then breaking them down to make new sheets.

When all the dresses were in their completed form, I broke them down to make a pulp and pressed 14 sheets of paper per day. At the end of a month, the dresses became 220 sheets of paper. The sheets have remnants of the embellishments added to the dresses.