Polly Kenny

MA Fashion Studies University of the Arts London

BA(Hons) Fashion Textiles Loughborough College of Art & Design.

Polly Kenny is a surface textile designer for fashion and interiors, Senior Lecturer in Surface Textiles at the London College of Fashion and has also taught in Denmark and Finland.

Polly's research areas include practice based research within digital textile design, ecological issues and e-learning.

Recent collaborative research has produced contemporary womenswear incorporating digital textile design and articulates ideas emerging in response to memory and the exploration of the archive. The work develops from an international collaborative project eCHO with Queensland University of Technology that explored the relationship between the garment form, purpose and surface textile design. This project allowed for close study of selected items of clothing from Australia categorised as ‘lost and degraded', worn through age and repeated laundering, and allowed the opportunity to produce work that is a synthesis of contemporary and historical sources. The implications of ‘handing down', the repair and alterations evidenced were important qualities, evoking the passage of time, embedded memory and the fragility and vulnerability of textiles. The work explores traditional hand processes, the mark of the hand, translated through a diverse range of techniques, combining digital and non-digital technology.