By Katie Dominy / 03-09-2009

The well-established Intermezzo gallery in Dordrecht is the setting for an exhibition of graduate work that covers fashion, jewellery, textiles and product design. Running until September 19, the gallery has picked pieces from 15 designers that revolve around the theme 'Wát een Werk' – loosely translating as One Hell of a Job.

'Wát een Werk' became the theme after the Intermezzo team, headed by Jolanda Branderhorst who runs Intermezzo, noticed the trend for designs involving craftwork and skill as well as hours and hours of patience to create visually arresting work.

Design.nl spoke to Hanneke Kal from Intermezzo about the gallery’s choice of designer. “Intermezzo has great affinity for craftwork and skill; both tradition with new applications and new appearances, and new forms of skill and craftsmanship, based on new, innovative technologies and materials. Craftwork is a trend that has been going on for a while now. In a time of mass production and mass consumption it offers a way to distinguish one’s self, by designing and creating limited edition products, without making concessions. But this year especially, we were struck by both quantity and quality of this kind of labour-intensive designing during our visits to the different graduation shows.

“A lot of the techniques are in a way familiar but performed in such a way that they caused amazement and respect for the results of this hard work and the way these techniques have been performed and carried out. Time is money, so there is real value in these labour-intensive designs, but there’s also the value of pride, satisfaction with what’s accomplished. These kinds of designs are personal because there’s quite a lot invested in them and this value is recognized by the public.”

Designers picked to appear at the show include Fleur Goenendorp, Kirsten Spuijbroek, Romy Kuhne, Lise Brunt and Rosanne Bergsma from the product design course at ArtEZ Arnhem, recently featured on Design.nl.

From the fashion departments, Intermezzo chose the work of Amber Brandsma from the Willem de Kooning Academy ADKA Rotterdam. Her collection, entitled 'langweilig', is concerned with the state of being bored and while one part of her collection revolves around a series of identical dresses, the second part represents the opposite. “An explosion of creativity, using the moments when I was bored and just started to make clothes or deconstructed them. I made garments and modelled existing garments with very labour-intensive treatments” comments the designer.

Denise Esser from the Rietveld Academy Amsterdam took the choreography of dance as the inspiration for her collection 'Transformation'. Close-up, the designs appear very chaotic due to the materials used, such as nails, fur and silk. When you zoom out, her collection gels into a solid form. The aspect of repetition taken from dance is found in the repetition of materials – layers, folds etc. The use of very heavy fabrics makes the garments only wearable by taking a firm body posture.

Winde Rienstra from HKU Utrecht’s fashion collection is entitled the 'Mirror of Reason' and references the fairytale of the Ice-Queen - an ode to cracking ice and the silence of the falling snow – coming from the designer’s background growing up in Friesland.

“The preference I have for traditional handwork techniques refers directly to the 'slow-fashion' movement. The temporary character of modern day fashion has little appeal for me; my quest for a measure of timelessness has brought me back to the cycles of nature. My partiality for natural materials like wood and glass also derives from this. One of the designs is hand-woven from glass beads and weighs approximately eleven kilos. The other design is made out of shoulder pads stitched together. They all took a really long time to make. Working and experimenting with these materials was a process I enjoyed very much.”

Jewellery designer Malu Berbers from ABKM Maastricht is inspired by ethnic jewellery. “The use of different materials, beautiful decorations and the fact that they are unwearable, most of the time, makes it very valuable. Every piece is unique, the way it has been made shows us the love for the material. Malu Berbers simple but effective pieces are made from PVC plastic tubes of the type used in water pipes – bound with cotton thread.

The graduation project from product designer Carla Maaijwee, also from Maastricht, is entitled 'Window Veil'. “The piece starts at the top with symbols that represent the start of the industrial revolution, down to till present day. The deformation in the pattern from top to bottom represents the course from refinement and craftsmanship, to production on a larger scale.”

Maaijwee explains, “It’s a crossover between fashion and product design. Before the industrial revolution, fashion, as well as interior products, were made to order and by hand, from tradition and Dutch costume. Clothing was therefore personal and unique. Personal stories about the person who wore the clothes were told in the details of the lace. The lace was the most unique part of the costume, from which you could tell someone’s identity; how rich the person was, from which part of the country, and their marital status. All of this has now disappeared due to the industrial revolution.”

Of scouting for graduates, Hanneke Kal says, “Every year in June and July we visit (almost) all graduation shows at the Dutch Academies of Arts, particularly the departments of Design and Fashion. To be honest, that is a hell of a job in itself: a very nice and inspiring hell of a job though.”

Wát een Werk runs from 19 August to 19 September 2009 at Intermezzo Gallery, Dordrecht.

Main image: Amber Brandsma
Image: Denise Esser
Image: Winde Rienstra
Image: Malu Berbers
Image: Carla Maaijwee

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