Manna Ly

To give us a sense of you as a designer, what is your major and why?

I major in constructed textiles, specifically knit. I was draw to the immediacy of the process and the inherent potential for form building. I am obsessed with finding new ways to create fully integrated forms from a linear material. Never one to work flat, I sometimes feel like a sculptor who uses yarn instead of clay.

 

Bricolage is about using and utilising what you find to hand. What tools or techniques do you find you can’t help coming back to?

Unpick, unravel, rewind, spin, grow, harvest, dye... I am not sure what it is that possesses me to pursue the most work intensive, time consuming processes of gathering, sorting and making my own materials. Perhaps the satisfaction of handmade, perhaps their meditative qualities (in other words I can watch movies at the same time).

 

Why textile design? (Or maybe by the end of the course, why not...!)

The universe must have favoured me the day I chose to study textile design with no real inkling as to what it was (I, like the general public, thought it was fashion). Unwittingly, I fell headfirst into this mad, yarn-filled niche that lets me make all manner of things from product, speculative design to artistic outcomes and thankfully it fits me like a glove.