Elizaveta Gnatchenko

My final project is inspired by my fascination with glass, a man-made material that plays the essential role in modern society.

Glass is both fragile and tough, it's everywhere and nowhere in our everyday lives, we live in buildings made entirely of glass, hidden and protected yet exposed in it. In modern cities, sleek reflective and cold glass architecture combined with industrial shapes co-exists with nature (human body being a part of it), shaping and restricting its ‘natural’ ways to serve a purpose. Human society is building a life by taming nature, but being a part of natural world ourselves we result in becoming a decaying specimen exposed in an entomological case. By affecting and reconstructing the organic, human society has altered the whole meaning of the words ‘natural’ and ‘real’. ‘Natural’ as I see it has become a phantom, an ephemeral man-made version of ‘real’.     

Working with glass substitutes (i.e. Perspex and acrylic treated to resemble glass, which also reflects the somewhat artificial or man-made character of modern ‘nature’) I would like to reflect the beauty of ‘natural’ shapes and textures in diverse stages of development (from de-composed to perfectly finished) thus exposing the manufactured and detached from natural character of nowadays world.  

In my pieces, shapes and forms inspired by nature combined with geometric architectural structures should envelop the human body as sculpture-like elements reminiscent of scaffolding. Restraining and ‘shaping’ the movements of the wearer according to the structure of a piece, seems essential to reflect how glass is shaping our behaviour in modern culture.