Skip to main content
Textiles (MA)

Charlotte Karin

Final Outcome, handwoven linen and wool jacket with inserted pampas grass for structure on back and front panels.

Charlotte Karin is a designer specialising in woven constructed textiles. Her practice is centred around the contemplative philosophy of depicting memory, fabricating this through handwoven textiles using the delicate technique’s leno and painted warps. Translating the narrative through the essence sculptural transients. Articulating a mood through an immersive ambiance.


She has developed a unique and personal approach to her process and concepts in textile weaving and construction, which stems from a highly exploratory focus.


Prior to an MA in Textiles at the Royal College of Art, Charlotte completed a BA in Textile Design at The University for Creative Arts in Farnham, Surrey.


Charlotte’s MA dissertation The Memories we Share received a distinction. The writing reveals the importance of Memory. A fundamental narrative, ability, and experience. Elevated by poets and philosophers as a phantasma. Exploring the relationship between recollections, life, and how we construct ourselves around memories. This research continues to support her practice.

Degree Details

School of DesignTextiles (MA)WeaveRCA2023 at Truman Brewery

Truman Brewery, F Block, First and second floors

Profile Image of Charlotte Karin at her Loom.

MEMOR


Mindful-Remembering-Unforgetting-Commemorative


The core of my work is to convey a sense of awe one may feel when witnessing natural phenomena (that of memory as metaphor), intersecting with the day-to-day life. The beauty in the tension, weaving to convey this duality.

This project takes a philosophical concept challenging the restlessness that exists in memory. 

I have fabricated a sensitive, holistic collection, each piece explores a different narrative, from the material, technical process to the structure from weaving. Each is an individual piece, yet they all speak a similar language. They materialise the immaterial, the fragmented.

My intentions for the textile collection are to convey a conversation between the permanent and the impermanent, the despair and comfort, and the many layers gathered of memory collections.

The pieces communicate the research and sensations through tactility and construction, becoming stories of an instinctual nature where the occasional twist and turns of the weft bring emotions, questions and perhaps understanding to the surface.


This is a collection for the fashion context which I have further developed into garments through a collaboration with Hannah Cooper. 

Collection of Materials
Collecting
Material Compositions
Compositions

Material Narratives

This project began during the wet, moody wither I foraged for materials, harvested flax, roots of dead plants, peeling away bark, nettle, stems and leaves.

I noticed that the materials changed from their collected state into more brittle surfaces when I had left them alone for several days.   I further distorted them; twisting, plying, and spinning, connecting with the rawness and dried substance, passing through my fingers, transitioning between conditions.

I questioned whether the materials stories embodied through textile could be made visible? Focusing on the imperfections that can be celebrated in in this matter, this involved experimental compositions that created space for a dialogue between; what the material once was and how it can be preserved, transformed, or re-designed though technical structures. This thereby aims to extend the narrative, contextualising the philosophy.


Pampas Grass Material Swatches
Pampas Grass Woven Sample

Pampas Grass Material Qualities

Allowing these to encapsulate and lead the design. The structural properties it adds, for embellishment or add form through composition. This highlights the technical process and discovery of the materials possibilities. This brings the material to the forefront of the design. Allowing these not only to act as inspiration but further encapsulate themselves within the sample. 


Woven Linen and Bast Fibre
Linen and Bast Fibre
Handwoven Linen and Tree Roots
Linen and Tree Roots

Traces

These abstractions tell stories of their material lives; the falx breaking and processing itself or the roots disintegrating. The person who wears them alters the design overtime. An everchanging textile, the memory of the material and the person become one, creating a new encounter with the material and its memory moving forward.

Using these foraged materials that do not necessarily have a clear function, integrating something that through being worn will change. These pieces therefore offer further development with this abstract medium and simultaneously conceptual samples can be commercial as inspirations. Pushing textiles in new constructive directions developing through adding wires and other materials that lend themselves to these industrial processes to give a similar theme. 

Handwoven Hemp, Silk Noil and Straw
Hemp, Silk Noil and Straw
Handwoven Linen, Silk Noil and Indigo Dyed Nettle
Linen, Silk Noil and Indigo Dyed Nettle

Compositions

These designs share the conversation happening through technique and materials. The woven design is similar, overlapping the overshot material, yet distinctively different in tone, dyes, and weft yarns. They communicate with one another through the composition and simultaneously and are completely individual. 


Screen printed Warp
Screen Printed Warp and Ikat
Ikat Dyed and Woven textile

Technique

The process of wrapping the yarns, consideration, time, withholding the warps story, concealing areas that are required to stay innocent and white. Unlike others which bring the marks to the forefront of the design. Transformed further through tensioning the warp.  

Bobbins warped to resist indigo dye in sections.
These bobbins once had a formal purpose for weave and lace making, now they have become these conceptual commodities that could be used as a fastening, pin or brooch. Storytelling Accessories, they are the by-product of the making and become things themselves, if we are prepared to read and listen to them.
Silver Birch Tree Bank Collected
The process and consideration involved in understanding and interrogating the materials. How the silver birch tree’s bark transforms in hot water, rolling and curling around itself through overdyeing with indigo. Using this to inform the design and casting it as an outcome.
The materials involved in casting bark to create a ring.
925 Sterling Silver Ring, cast from collected materials.
925 Sterling Silver Ring, cast from collected materials.
Handwoven leno lace textile
Handwoven leno lace textile with a screen printed warp distorted through tensioning. The fabric was used for a collaborative skirt design.
handwoven fabric pinned to skirt design

Initial designs

To incorporate the designs into my desired context I collaborated with MA RCA Fashion Student Hannah Cooper.

Our collaboration was focused on the material properties. Our vision for bespoke lies in the individualisation of processes and hand craft techniques. The collaboration gave an insight into working with a fashion designer, understanding the way a pattern is produced and how one might construct a garment by engineering the design through weave. 

Sketch of Jacket with initial sample
Jacket with Handwoven 5 meter textile with sections of Pampas grass

Handwoven fabric designed for Spring/Summer 2024

The jacket is made from 5 meter's of handwoven wool/linen cloth with sections of pampas grass adding structure to oppose conventional tailoring methods. The skirt is woven with a delectate lace technique, spacing the warp and weft to create undulating lines, floating around skirt. Tailored and constructed into ready to wear fashion garment' in collaboration with Hannah Cooper. 

In Collaboration with:

MA Fashion Student, who designed the pattern, constructed and tailor made the fashion outcomes.
collaborationhandwovenjacketnarrativetextiletexturalweave
Previous StudentNext Student

Social

About

Royal College of Art

Registered Office: Royal College of Art,
Kensington Gore, South Kensington,
London SW7 2EU