Aimee Soo. UNSW School of Art & Design. New Talents Award Nominee 2024

Name of graduation student: Aimee Soo
Name of guiding teacher: Ms Emma Peters

Nominated by UNSW School of Art & Design

The Bachelor of Design at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia has a focus on interdisciplinary practice through seven disciplinary studios in the Integrated Design specialisation. Students can specialise in Contemporary Jewellery within the Object Design disciplinary studio. In their Graduation Project, students are asked to expand and deepen conceptual, technical and experimental approaches to practice, and to define where their interdisciplinary project intersects with the ethical concerns of our time. Our nomination of Aimee Soo is on the basis of her novel approach to explorations of material sustainability, and the level of excellence and technical resolve displayed in her work. Aimee integrates these concerns through ‘conversations’ with waste materials which are then elevated to finely-crafted wearable jewellery pieces which communicate new hierarchies of value.
/ Stephen Goddard, Deputy Head of School (Design)


Statement of the artist:
Material Conversations is a methodology for cultivating connection with novel sustainable materials; manifested as a brooch collection and ongoing archive of explorative material samples. Through a process of listening and thinking through making, the project addresses and challenges an unspoken hierarchy of perceived value of materials. Even though they have the potential to have a positive impact on circular material practice, these materials have a reputation for being un-precious and undesirable.

Adding to the research and development already going into the physical durability and forms of these materials, Material Conversations specialises in their emotional durability and perception. The project engages with a feedback loop of deeply ‘listening’ to the materials through researching and producing them; followed by a ‘response’ of setting them in to silver brooches that tell their unique stories and custom fit their physical qualities.

The work is an archive of the invisible but intriguing processes and ontology of materials that are still forming identities in material culture. Nurturing a user-material relationship founded on non-prescriptive discovery, it is a way of planting a positive seed for the next time the viewer or wearer of the brooches encounters the material in the future. This project is an approach to fostering new narratives and meaning, for new materials, cultivated by empathy.


Contact:
Mail: aimee.fl.soo@gmail.com
Instagram: a.soodesigns

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