One Whose Whole Body Knows is a knitted sweater series formed by an intuitive, dynamic and individualised design process. The process work was carried out with two live subjects interacting with some second-hand sweaters during a residency at Ehkä Kutomo in Turku, 2019. Two forms of process documentation emerged - a video work made in collaboration with Anneli Nygren & subject Eeva Värtö, and a photographic collage series made in collaboration with Helen Korpak and subject Bogna Wisniewska. The work reacts against standardised, mass-produced forms of clothing, using knitting as the method to translate spontaneous moments captured between body and material. As the functional necessity for new clothing decreases, this work seeks new ways of interpreting clothing design and its outcomes. The work was originally inspired by a chapter called Skinscapes: Embodiment, Culture and Environment, in The Book of Touch (2005).

Directed by Kasia Gorniak, filmed and edited by Anneli Nygren, with subject Eeva Värtö.

MiniDV cassette footage, 4:37

2022

Kasia Zofia Gorniak (1987) is a fashion designer-researcher from Melbourne, based in Helsinki since 2014. Her research, ‘Dialogical narratives as method and matter for meaningful design practice’, carried out at Aalto University, experiments with participatory approaches as a means to greater garment-wearer attachment in the field of sustainable fashion design. Gorniak established her knitwear practice 'talking through our bodies' in 2018, with works formed around performative and collaborative design processes, framing garments as facilitators of communication between bodies.