Rachel Wingfield

Rachel Wingfield is a Research Fellow and Lecturer on the MA Textile Futures course at Central Saint Martins, School of Fashion and Textiles.
After graduating from the RCA in 2002 Rachel setup the design and research studio Loop.pH to create and develop new and reactive surfaces and structures. She has worked on architectural and fashion commissions to product design and conducts an extensive range of research activities collaborating with industry and multi-disciplinary groups.
Rachel has fabricated reactive surfaces for a variety of environments, from the public to the domestic and the reworking of familiar objects has become a vehicle to communicate her ideas to a wide audience.
Through Loop.pH Rachel has exhibited internationally with the British Council and at furniture fairs and shows in Amsterdam, Milan, Tokyo, New York, Valencia, Istanbul, Stockholm and Moscow. Her work has been shown at the Design Museum and V&A Museum in London, where Digital Dawn is now part of the permanent textile collection.
Recent events include:
2006
2006 May HauteGREEN, exhibition on sustainable design, New York
2006 Mar Fabricating Technology Symposium, Edinburgh College of Art
2006 Mar Invited by Droog Design to participate in the exhibition New British Designers, Amsterdam
2006 Jan electro-botanical Luminescent window-display in collaboration with f0am & Foton, Recyclart, Brussels.
2005
2005 Oct Weather Patterns Installation, York Art Gallery
2005 Oct Active Materials workshop, Brussels
2005 Sept 21st Century Textiles, Shire Hall Gallery, Staffordshire
2005 Sept Istanbul Design Week 'Twinkle Twinkle', British Council, Turkey
2005 Sept DESIGN MART Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales
2005 Aug Extra Ordinary Kulturhuset, Stockholm
2005 Jun Victoria & Albert Museum, Touch Me History Table
2005 Jan Feb Maison et Objet Paris-Nord Villepinte
2005 Mar 100% Design Moscow 'Twinkle Twinkle', British Council, Russia 'Twinkle, Twinkle: new light from the UK is a touring exhibition of the best in current British lighting design.'

As a practitioner her current research strand is a biomimetic investigation into reactive, self-powering surfaces driven by systems and models of growth exhibited in nature. She is exploring the language of dynamic pattern in the form of ambient, unobtrusive displays within domestic and public spaces and looks to augment the function of decorative, printed surfaces by enabling them to respond to and synthesise information with temporal patterns and colours. She is seeking to develop textile materials that are a part of a dynamic, self-sufficient system with the ability to communicate, similarly to how plants have a constant dialogue with their environment.
In her work she views the domestic sphere as a garden in which she can transform traditional decorative surfaces into rich, dynamic displays of botanical life. Her pieces are the seeds of a story, which grow and develop in response to its environment. Nature is a vast source of ideas to mimic and be inspired by, rather than a source of materials to extract, convert then discard.
Her work aims to provide a more intuitive understanding of our natural environment, from day-night cycles to power consumption with ongoing research into the physiological effects of light and colour on the human body.