Founded by Vancouver-based artist Cyd Eva and Durban-based artist Costa Besta, PatternNation is a collaborative and inclusive platform aimed at connecting artists who embrace bold colour and pattern globally.
PatternNation collaborations engage with many indigenous and radical thinking artists around the world. As an act of decolonization through art, PatternNation shoots videos, hosts events, and creates clothing aimed at sparking conversation around identity politics. By raising the question of “Who made my clothes?”, our work also challenges the disposability politics pervasive in our plastic-dependent, fast fashion-obsessed world. In addition to this activism through art, part of our platform’s mandate is to create more space for inter-generational women and people of colour in fashion and to facilitate cross-cultural exchange through art.
The aim of PatternNation is to work directly with artists from various backgrounds and create content that subverts the usual consumption of Caucasian minimalist work pervasive in the art and fashion worlds. We are living in a pattern nation, repetition is in music, fashion, visual art, even the way we move through our cities and live our daily routines. Every pre-colonial civilization embraced pattern in their own unique way, which has been slowly drained out of people through fast fashion and homogenous global fashion trends. Every Artist that collaborates with or represents PatternNation embodies these values through wearing and creating art that is rich with bright colours and striking patterns.
What I love about PatternNation is that it’s not only a jewellery and design brand but also a way of thinking about the world. This is why during an impromptu visit to Durban in May 2018, I became part of this dynamic international art collective. The way I found Cyd and Costa was serendipitous: after several housing options fell through at the last minute, I reached out to a friend, who suggested I contact Cyd asking for a place to stay. When I saw how brightly dressed and involved with the local arts community she was, I knew that we were meant to meet! We became fast friends, and it is in under our beautiful little cosmic umbrella and with the encouragement from PatternNation, Cath Colour Carver and Alyssa Burt that I began my own project, Kasa Kava.
Let us embrace and play with bold colour and pattern through the way we dress and the spaces we live in!
Let us question our consumption practices and interrogate the fashion industry’s dependence on environmentally destructive and inhumane production practices!
May we be dynamic, healthy, and fully alive!
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PatternNation has exhibited and collaborated in these cities: Vancouver, Montreal, Johannesburg, Durban, London, Oxford, Mumbai, Bangalore and Los Angeles. if you would like PatternNation to come to your city, please contact us.
(Text adapted from http://www.pattern-nation.com. For more information please visit their website!)
