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Student Showcase Archive

Dr Elaine Igoe

Info

  • Dr Elaine Igoe is a Visiting Tutor, developing and supporting research in Textiles in the School of Design.

  • Biography

  • Dr Elaine Igoe completed her undergraduate degree in Multimedia Textiles at Loughborough University, and MA Fashion: Textiles for Fashion at Central St Martins College of Art and Design. Following this she undertook freelance commissions and established her academic career at the University of Portsmouth, completing her PhD in Textiles at the Royal College of Art in 2013.

    Elaine has experience of lecturing at undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. She leads the Fashion, Textiles and Material Futures Research and Innovation Group at the University of Portsmouth and has recently served as Research Lead for the School of Art and Design at the University of Portsmouth including contributing to Research Excellence Framework strategy and preparation. 

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  • Practice

  • Adopting materials, texts and processes, often from beyond the expected Elaine adapts and innovates with them to create new surfaces, fabrications and texts. 

    Elaine’s designs have been featured in leading trend publications such as Elle Decoration and International Textiles and she has exhibited, sold and presented practice and research in Paris, Hong Kong, Berlin, Ireland and the USA as well as at London Fashion Week. She is a Texprint (now TexSelect­­­) ‘Breaking New Ground’ prize winner and alumna.

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  • External collaborations

  • Elaine has served as an external advisor for doctoral students at the University of Portsmouth, the Royal College of Art and Chelsea College of Art and Design. She holds a Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy and is a full member of The Textile Society and the Design Research Society. She is external examiner at the University of Huddersfield and De Montfort University. Elaine is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice and regularly peer reviews for other leading academic journals and international conferences.

  • Publications, exhibitions and other outcomes

  • Dr Igoe, E. (2018) 'Change matters: theories of postdigital textiles and material design', Proceedings of DRS 2018 International Conference: Catalyst. Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. & Bohemia, E. (eds.). Design Research Society,   (DRS International Conference Series; vol. 4) pp. 1787–1799

    Dr Igoe, E. (2015) 'Craft of use'  In: Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice. 2, 2, pp. 215–219

    Dr Igoe, E. (2013) 'In textasis: matrixial narratives of textile design', PhD thesis, Royal College of Art

    Dr Igoe, E. (2013) 'The textile reader', In: Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture. 11, 1, pp. 110–112

    Dr Igoe, E. (2010) 'The tacit-turn: textile design in design research' In : Duck Journal for Research in Textiles and Textile Design. 1, pp. 1–11 

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  • Awards and Grants

  • 2016–2017 University Research Sabbatical, University of Portsmouth

Research

Research interests

Elaine’s design research utilises feminist qualitative research methods, exploring relationality through storytelling, autoethnography and metaphor. Her work both commentates on and aims to establish the position of textile and material design with design research discourses. Elaine’s recent research publications focus on notions of postdigitality and new materialism in the context of textile thinking.

Current and recent research

A forthcoming publication ‘Textile Design Theory in The Making’ is in development for Bloomsbury Academic, due in 2020.