Talent Talks: Jessie von Curry
Jessie Curry’s research project examines the evolutionary connections between plants and humans. Using Saccharina Japonica kelp and abaca fiber, the costume PLANTSPEAK and short film envision vegetal languages to inspire interspecies dialogue. Curry investigates seaweed, the 'ancestor of all plants,' highlighting its interactions in daily life while preserving its ancient knowledge and diverse qualities.
Could you please introduce yourself?
I’m a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher based between London, UK and Portland, OR. Through my artistic practice and studio, VonCurry, I engage in material experimentation, visual research, and conceptual design across fashion, costume, performance and sculpture. With a background in apparel and costume design combined with a career in sustainability and communications, I bring an interdisciplinary approach to visual stories, focusing on materiality, consumption, embodiment and ecology.
Having graduated recently, how do you look back on your studies?
I view my recent postgraduate studies as a fruitful creative gift to myself. After a career without much expression or creativity, I was seeking an innovative and experimental course that aligned with how I viewed costume design – as a story-telling artform in itself. I shifted my life towards this aim and feel incredibly grateful to have found it at London College of Fashion. The course professors, researchers, and fellow classmates were all encouraging in our mutual pursuit of finding our own artistic voices as we used costume design to express what we cared most about.
While I began with a clear vision of the philosophies and stories I wanted to explore, I graduated with a honed creative practice. I was able to merge my love of material experimentation with design-research and storytelling, empowering me to take on a more innovative and integrated approach to my work.
Could you please tell us something about your graduation collection/project?
My final master’s project, PLANTSPEAK, was inspired by emerging research on plant communication. Eight years ago, I participated in a forest bathing and biomarker study and learned about our bodies’ absorption of airborne volatile organic compounds, which plants and trees constantly emit as a form of communication. The idea that our bodies have evolved to absorb their ancient illusive language struck me, and over time I began to view this as an embodied interspecies dialogue.
For PLANTSPEAK, I wanted to create a costume and film that sheds light on these vegetal languages and explores how our greater sensory attunement could aid in our co-evolutionary capacity as a species. In alignment with this, I worked to incorporate sustainable design practices into the making of the costume such as prioritising the use of renewable natural raw materials, low-energy processes, low-impact adhesives, minimising waste, and the use of material offcuts. More specifically, the costume’s primary material is a combination of glycerine-treated Saccharina Japonica kelp (a process I learned from artist Julia Lohmann) to which I applied abaca fibre for additional flexibility and durability required for performance. This material was then sewn into pleats with seams bound in a cellulosic-latex paper.
Photo by Antonia Penia
Which materials, techniques, programmes and/or applications are you mostly interested in?
I’m currently immersed in the world of seaweeds! As ‘the ancestor of all plants’, I’m in constant of awe of their variety of textures, colours, movement, environments, and the critical role they have played therein for millenia. I am keen to continue exploring how we can bring seaweeds into our materials, design and other aspects of our lives – but beyond bioplastic or bio-based synthetic methods and instead through means that preserve inherent qualities to their form, function, and species.
Beyond this, creating novel materials, textures and fabrication techniques of various raw natural materials seem to be the greater thread that inspires most of my work, so I trust this will continue in many different forms ahead.
The exhibition you are a part of looks into the meaning of regeneration. What does regeneration mean to you and your work?
Regeneration embraces the cyclical nature of the world and everything created within it. For me, it’s about letting go of permanance, perfection and preconceived notions, and instead is about working to embed observation, responsiveness, and flow into creative processes. The more space and time I allow for this, the more closely aligned to regeneration my projects tend to be. I worked to embrace this throughout the costume making of PLANTSPEAK, as well as through the film, where you observe this conceptual creature move through its life cycle stages of embryonic, growth, maturity and decay.
How do you perceive the meaning and importance of community within the fashion field?
To me, fashion is a dynamic living system shaped by human and non-human communities, from field to fibre to fabric and beyond. Creating any garment is a cooperative effort, and I feel very fortunate to have experienced this intimately through personal projects and at scale through my past career in sustainability across fashion, sportswear, and outdoor brands. In my experience, gathering a diverse community of perspectives is integral to generating innovative thinking and collaborative solutions – both of which are critical to fashion as an ever-evolving system.
How do you view the future of fashion? And your own role therein?
I hope our future world sees fashion as something alive – a living and breathing system where we can grow living materials as an interspecies cooperation, embrace a diversity of material sources and processes, and design with the whole lifecycle in mind. I’d be honoured to have the role as a designer within this kind of ecosystem – one that gathers and shares inspiration from the choir of species and systems whose evolutionary knowledge predates our own and works with others to imagine new possibilities to redesign our future in this world.
