fashioned from nature

Fashioned from Nature was an exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which opened on 21st April 2018. It traces the interconnections between fashion design, materials, natural history and environmental issues from 1600 to the present day.

The Fashioned From Nature curators commissioned Rob St John and Tommy Perman to create a series of sound works through the galleries to accompany the exhibits.

The sound pieces use the artists’ own field recordings alongside archival recordings from the British Library Sound Archive, The Macaulay Library at Cornell Lab of Ornithology, The Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle Archives and Creative Commons recordings from freesound.org.

The sound works trace the geographies of global exploration, biological discovery and material fabrication in the fashion trade at specific historical moments. The six-channel, immersive work guides visitors through the galleries, evoking both individual species and their natural habitats, and the technologies of manufacture, exploration and energy production which brought them to market.

More information on each sound piece here.