Primitive Streak

I just interviewed former fashion designer Helen Storey about her Primitive Streak project. It’s a collaboration with her sister Dr. Kate Storey (a developmental biologist) that seeks to explore the first 1,000 hours of human embryonic development through the medium of fashion.

Here is a five-minute Q & A with Helen, on the project itself, and her move from fashion design into a peculiar sort of fashion-art-science practice:

How did the project come about?

<p>Primitive Streak came from a leaflet I was sent by my sister. I had just left the fashion industry, and was looking for something that was more design-based than running a business, and she at the time was studying at Oxford, and the Welcome Trust had just started a project called <a href="http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/1/pinpubscisocart.html">sciart</a>, and we were one of the recipients of the first prizes. It was really an idea my sister brought to me, and that we sorted out over the dinner table one Christmas. I went down to her lab, and started looking at the work she did. Although it seemed like an unlikely collaboration at the beginning &#8211; frocks and biology &#8211; they [the Welcome Trust] seemed to like the idea, so we took it from there.</p>

<p>And so the combination of fashion and biology came about just because you&#8217;re a fashion designer and your sister is a biologist?</p>

<p>It had to have a connection to the two people doing it, and fashion was my background, developmental biology was heres, so that side of it was a given. It was up to us to find a way to find a body of work that, as the Welcome Trust put it, &#8216;grabbed the imagination of the public.&#8217; That was the underlying brief.</p>

<p>I was reading your <a href="http://www.helenstoreyfoundation.org/ps_process.html">diaries</a> of the project, and it seemed the experience was quite fraught. Did you anticipate that it would&#8230; grab hold of you to that extent?</p>

<p>The whole thing was an experiment, from the beginning and on both sides. Kate and I knew very little of each other&#8217;s worlds, either personally and certainly professionally. So it was a sort of getting together again of two sisters, if you like, as much as it was art and science getting together. It wasn&#8217;t fraught, but it was very intense. We had to do it over a very short period, about four months, and at the time I didn&#8217;t have a studio or any staff, and most important of all, I knew very little about biology. It was very intense in terms of what I had to learn, and also in finding a dynamic that would make sense of both the science and the art.</p>

<p>And do you think you succeeded in that?</p>

<p>Seven years later it&#8217;s still going! I think one of the reasons it was successful is that the medium used to illustrate the science is completely non-threatening &#8211; not many people are frightened of a frock. The fact that it is fashion allows people who would normally be alienated from science a doorway into it. That has been one of the most powerful features of the project, and one we didn&#8217;t imagine that at the time. When we finished it, we stood back and didn&#8217;t have a clue what we had created &#8211; there&#8217;s something in the fact that fashion and textiles allows a very wide audience to find something in it.</p>

<p>And how did the process compare to previous collections, to straight fashion design?</p>

<p>Initially, I tried to think of it as a fashion collection, and realised that that wasn&#8217;t going to work. Also, I would probably have missed some of the freedoms the work allowed if I constrained it to what I had learned in fashion. I knew that these things didn&#8217;t neccesarily have to be worn, I didn&#8217;t have to sell them to Harvey Nicholls, I didn&#8217;t have to think about who would be wearing them at film premiers. The work didn&#8217;t have a commercial value as such, and that brought an enormous freedom. In terms of designing, I put what I might think of immediately on hold, and as I was looking down the microscope I tried to let the science suggest the craft, which I then had to go and find or invent. I was informed by my past, but in some ways I had to shelve my past at the same time.</p>

<p>Right. That leads me on to the next question &#8211; it seems to me that you&#8217;re an artist using fashion as a means to explore questions of science. Is that right? Where do you place yourself?</p>

<p>I think I&#8217;m pretty placeless, to be honest, in that my curiosity goes right across a number of disciplines. I don&#8217;t think that I will neccesarily do any work that has anything to do with fashion and textiles again. Primitive Streak was a bridge between what I knew into this new world of science. Then Mental, if you look at that, there is only one of the five pieces taht is textile-orientated. So, as I get more and more enamoured with the world of science, it becomes less and less to do with my fashion heritage, and more and more to do with trying to build up new mechanisms of communicating science to a lay public. I don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;d call that.</p>

<p>It&#8217;s more akin to being a conceptual artist, I guess&#8230;</p>

<p>You could say that, I hadn&#8217;t thought of that. One reason that other artists might not call me an artist is that one thing that has carried over is that I want my work to have a use. Whereas I think that when an artists sets out, that isn&#8217;t in their mids, that a work has to be useful.</p>

<p>So what you&#8217;re doing has to have an educational value?</p>

<p>Yes, the audience are very important, to the extent that they might complete the work or be an ongoing part of it, so in that sense it is less about me and more about them.</p>

<p>Right. What are you working on right now?</p>

<p>I&#8217;m working on a very big project, one that I&#8217;m keeping under wraps at the moment, because I&#8217;m hoping it will last a lifetime. Every artist, or anyone who tries to produce something that is not commercial, gets very tired of the funding hoops you have to jump through. That seems to be quite wasteful in terms of energy, so I&#8217;m trying to come up with an idea that I can grow over a number of years, but will still be very much to do with the facilitation of other people&#8217;s imaginations. It not concrete yet, but it&#8217;s another leap forward &#8211; if Primitive Streak was a leap away from fashion, and <a href="http://www.helenstoreyfoundation.org/wim_home.html">Mental</a> away from Primitive Streak, this is another leap again.</p></blockquote>

Posted at 3pm on 18/07/03 by Jack Mottram to the art and culture category.
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