BECOMING GHILLIE

Becoming Ghillie is a self-initiated research project in collaboration with product designer Elza Berzina. With this project we deepened our personal researches on how to bodily relate to landscapes, in particular through garments. We experimented with the potential role of textiles in stimulating play-fullness and heightening sensual experience while being outside. Through this process we aim to better understand how to extend ourselves towards the non-human realm: how to become ghillie*. 

First we investigated the interactive properties of different types of textiles from 'natural' to synthetic and distinguished between the qualities they have towards our own bodies - in particular how they feel on the skin - as well as their visual qualities in relation to a natural environment. We discovered that often it is the synthetic materials and their way of interacting with light and creating sounds through movement, that are most interesting in their capacity to visually interact with a landscape. Throughout the process we created a variety of sensorial-relational textile tools and exercises for playing with these sensations. 

Finally we made a 'ghillie suit': a work-wear that combines a strange but sensual tactile experience with an enchanting visual interaction through light and movement. Currently we are working on a video that captures the experience of 'becoming ghillie'.

*The English word “ghillie” is derived from the Scots Gaelic 'gille', meaning a young man or older boy who works as an outdoor assistant. This is most familiar in reference to those employed to assist sportsmen with recreational shooting or fishing in the Highlands. In Scottish mythology the term “ghillie” is believed to refer to an earth spirit clothed in leaves and moss - also called a 'Gille Dubh'. 

Today a ghillie suit is a type of camouflage clothing designed to resemble the background environment such as foliage, snow or sand. Typically, it is a net or cloth garment covered in loose strips of burlap, cloth, or twine, sometimes made to look like leaves and twigs, and optionally augmented with scraps of foliage from the area. We used a typical ghillie suit to create the workwear of the fictional character Eve in our Future Stories.