Threaded Realities: From Skin to Space

A sensory exhibition of sculptural fibre and couture, exploring how material shapes body and space.

Threaded Realities: From Skin to Space brings together Melbourne-based fibre artist Kasia Dudkiewicz (Knotted by Hand) and slow fashion designer Lea Oldjohn (Corde Couture) in an immersive exploration of material, memory and embodied design.

Working across sculpture and garment, both artists share a material language rooted in fibre — knotting, wrapping, draping and shaping by hand. Through large-scale textile installations and sculptural couture pieces, the exhibition investigates how soft materials can carry tension, resilience and emotional weight. What emerges is a quiet dialogue between body and space: garments that hold form like architecture, and fibre works that move like skin.

Opening night features a contemplative “Textile Walk” — a slow procession activating the space through movement — alongside artist talks, live fibre-making sessions and a tactile material archive that reveals the processes behind each work.

Responding to Melbourne Design Week’s call to consider the world we are shaping, Threaded Realities proposes an alternative design ethos: one that privileges intimacy over spectacle, texture over polish, and human presence over speed. In an era of digital saturation and accelerated production, the exhibition asks whether the future of design might lie in slower systems, embodied knowledge and materials shaped — quite literally — by hand.