Lotta Lundstedt and Rae Mariz are delighted to be showing their pieces in an empty boutique in Utopia surrounded by even more vacant stores.
This is the perfect context to consider these unconventional works. Lotta creates her deliberate art through an academic research lens; Rae has her defiant DIY, anti-consumerist ethos.
Even if it at first glance, it might be hard to see the connection between our work—to put Rae’s punky riot of color beside Lotta’s hues of natural-dyed experimentations—they’re part of the same fabric.
They called this show One of a Kind to highlight the handmade, anti-mass produced nature of our work and the variation that arises even through repetitive processes.
But with these pieces and collections, we hope to show that less emphasis should be put on the “One”—the quirky authentic uniqueness which is often a “selling point” in appreciating and marketing the handmade—and more on the “Of a Kind”.
That taken together, the collections and the individual pieces share a spirit of deliberate dissent and demonstrate the importance of making time to create, stitch by stitch and weave after weave.
Lotta Lundstedt works as associate professor in the Department of Creative Studies at Umeå University. She leads her design students to not only construct and create in their various mediums, but to think about the role of their creation in the wider world with particular emphasis on sustainability of materials and manufacturing practices, plus encouraging them to consider the social expression inherent in clothing beyond trends in fashion.
Rae Mariz is a speculative fiction storyteller and cultural critic. She’s written science fiction for young adults cautioning against the commodification of youth culture and creativity, and has been a long-time collaborator with a loose constellation of Stockholm street artists. No matter the genre or medium, her work is subversive, delightful, and scary smart.