Iris van Herpen on Her Exhibition at QAGOMA
Fresh from a stunning Paris Haute Couture presentation entitled ‘Hybrid’, where designer Iris Van Herpen replaced the traditional runway setting with a gallery room where garments were mounted on the wall and exhibited alongside a series of “aerial sculptures”, the ground-breaking Dutch designer flew into Brisbane to open the first major survey of her work, Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, at QAGOMA. Curated in partnership with the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, the exhibition features 130 garments and accessories from across the designer’s career, arranged according to nine themes. The pieces sit among immersive soundscapes created by her partner and collaborator, the Dutch sound artist Salvador Breed. The exhibition follows a journey from the deep sea to the outer reaches of the cosmos and reveals how van Herpen has combined traditional craftsmanship with innovative technologies to create a new language that synthesises ideas from fields as diverse as ancient mythology, marine biology and quantum physics. Alison Kubler spoke to Van Herpen about the collision of art and fashion and the desire to slow down the process.
Alison Kubler Iris, this exhibition explores the intersections between fashion and art. I know you’ve just staged your haute couture show in Paris, so I wondered if you might tell me a little about your interest in art and how the two disciplines come together.
Iris van Herpen In my universe and my imagination, there is no strong separation between those worlds. In Paris, I recently showed the body works and some sculptures, and it’s beautiful to talk about this hybrid universe with people. I understand that people are trying to understand things and, therefore, separating things into their own spheres and bubbles, but in my creative process, I’m not setting those rules. I have a strong love and focus on the body. But you can see, over the many years, that the work is ultimately very interdisciplinary. I think beauty actually lies between the disciplines and the hybrids. I've been learning so much from the different disciplines and by bringing them into my process, the work has evolved into a new form of expression.
In my own work, but also within the creative worlds, art and fashion are growing together more and more. It’s becoming more fluid. Throughout history, there have always been waves where our disciplines have become more intertwined and times when disciplines have been more separated. It all starts with school and then university, separating out of disciplines, but there have been many centuries where it was normal to be an artist and a scientist simultaneously.
When I think of my youth now, I realise that my mind was already interdisciplinary, especially in the way my parents educated me. I was doing dance, music, painting, making garments, all of that. I went to the art academy and I did one year of different disciplines at the same time. After that year, I had to choose. I had to choose one discipline!
AK That would've been hard for you!
IVH At the time, it didn’t feel difficult. For me, fashion or couture is a way of expressing many disciplines, so it was a natural choice. But, how beautiful would it be if some artists could work on multiple disciplines from that moment? You see with a lot of artists, musicians and actresses who are moving into different disciplines, it comes back that they are and have multiple identities. They want to express themselves in different disciplines. It takes time because you are first narrowed down, and then you have to open up yourself again.
AK My middle daughter is very scientific and mathematical but also very artistic. She often tells me that even at the age of 17, there are just not enough lifetimes to do everything.
IVH No, it's true. I had that feeling too.
AK I walked into the show at QAGOMA and thought, I just can't wait for my daughter to see the work.
IVH I’m often joking with my partner or other people and saying, “In my next lifetime, I’m going to be this and in my lifetime after that, I'm going to be this”. And there’s so much to explore. And the more we evolve as human beings, the more we’ve lived. I don’t think we should be too harsh on ourselves trying to fit ourselves into this one-dimensional being.
AK It strikes me that the term fashion is not entirely sufficient to describe what you do. Very few fashion designers genuinely fall into the artist category, but you are one of them. It strikes me that you are making garments for the body, but they're more than clothes.
IVH Yes, I have a very strong focus on the body, and that again comes from my dance background. Perhaps it’s not an accident that the clothes come onto the body, but there is a whole world around them (the clothes) that I also want to explore. This is something that I’m realising more and more. I have done collaborations within dance and architecture, when I’ve designed something very differently from the couture pieces. Also, through this exhibition, I actually realised how important the whole experience of couture is. Before, I was purely thinking about the design itself and now I’m starting to realise I want to work on that design, but the whole experience of that design is as important as the design itself. How is someone engaging with it?
Within my presentations, music has become much more present and the space and the whole “experience” of the work have become much more important.” That’s why, for example, in Paris for Haute Couture Week, I decided to present the work in a very different way so people could have time to experience it. Usually, with a catwalk, the work comes by and is gone in a few seconds. We work on those pieces sometimes for four to five months, with sometimes eight people working on a piece at once, and you are presenting it in a way where people don’t even really see it. So, there has been a moment of me realising that I want the physical body to still be in there, obviously, but the experience had to be designed in a way that people can engage and really understand the work. That’s definitely something I became more conscious about through the exhibition. I felt people understand the work so much better now and have had a very personal experience because they could just look at it for a longer period of time. It was so beautiful in Paris; it was the best of both worlds: people could engage with the work as long as they wanted to and, at the same time, the ‘body’ was in there and the identity of the transformations of the performers.
AK Did you work with dancers, or were they models?
IVH They all have big modelling careers, but I chose them very specifically because they are all artists in their own right. They are beautiful but doing other things than modelling alone; they do performance art or make sculpture themselves. There had to be a certain understanding of what I wanted to show.
AK Your work explores science and biology. I was particularly struck by the photograph by Nick Knight of a model inside the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
IVH I’ve been there quite a few times. There is a program that they run called Arts at CERN and they invite artists to do a residency. Some artists go onsite for multiple months to create works, really in dialogue with the artist and the scientist. I have been unable to do that because I don’t have enough time to go there. But I go now and then, and I can let the person in charge know my specific interests because there are so many people there it needs to be curated. Often, from those conversations, my imagination has taken a new path.
AK I particularly enjoyed the room in this exhibition that is devoted to your mood boards, with the sample fabrics and experiments, and with the patterns and toiles as well. The only thing I wished it had was the facility to touch some samples because I'm desperate to touch them! I just want to know how heavy the fabric is. I was thinking that it would be one little great thing if there were some bits that you could touch.
IVH Yes, we looked into that because I have done it in an exhibition before. It’s extraordinary because often, when the texture is three-dimensional, you think automatically its rigid or heavy. And it’s always the opposite! The opposite is true within my work. And you understand ultimately the textures and the materiality much more, but from our experience, there are so many people touching that a sample is gone very quickly.
AK Particularly the 3D printed material I suppose.
IVH Yes. The sample is diminished, or people take it!
AK Well, I would probably take it too! Thank you Iris for speaking to me and for your beautiful body of work.
Iris van Herpen Sculpting the Senses continues at QAGOMA until October 7, 2024. To purchase tickets and learn more visit QAGOMA.
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