Natalie Kieleithner

South African born creative Natalie Kieleithner is a multi-disciplinary practitioner with a central focus on fashion design. Being of cross cultural heritage and spending her younger years in Germany, she has developed a deep and intrinsic interest in identity, the human sensory experience, and globalisation of culture and design. Natalie has recently graduated from a Bachelor of Design (Fashion) Honours at RMIT University Melbourne, Australia. Her eclectic body of work is linked by the universal ideal of the human condition, with each undertaking being a new perspective on the emotive experience of the senses, explored through the use of customised materiality. Natalie’s philosophy is based on the value of process, creating a sensory experience and elevation, the use of hand in the construction and above all the creation of personalised textiles. Her graduate body of work is the most successful embodiment of these ideals to date.

Collection rational:

The word Tacenda is a term that refers to a powerful experience better left unspoken and communicated emotionally through other senses. The body of work examines the notion of concealing and revealing the body. It has centralised ideas of sensory elevation and depravation with particular relation to sight and blindness. It explores the idea of veiling and breaking down the emotional and physical notion of the veil. Tacenda incorporates the personally created textile technique of customised perforations with fringing interwoven through the holes, to explore unique textile surfaces and address the idea of creating and filling a void - revealing and then concealing. The woven fringing textile appears solid and thick when still, until motion enlivens it, splitting the individual strands from each other revealing the body beneath. The perforated dot repetition is complemented by its raised counterpart in beaded embellishment, with the placement of the dots informed largely by the braille alphabet. The textiles in motion illuminates the relationship to the body and the heightened sensory experience. The fluid, liquid, movement of the long lengths of fringing give the garments a soul of their own, craving a wearer to bring them to life.