Navigating Niche Industries: The Journey of Multidisciplinary Artist Charlotte Dack
From Mechanical Garments to Artistic Exploration: Unveiling the Path of a Creative Visionary
Multidisciplinary artist, Charlotte Dack shares her journey and personal experience as a mechanical garments designer, stylist, and costume designer; among other things and how she navigates niche industries as a 2023 cohort, on a free residency at Makerversity to support her practices.
The CSM alumni graduated as the covid-19 pandemic hit us all globally, making it more difficult to build her portfolio during her final year of undergraduate studies in Performance: Design and Practice. However, her combined experience of a traditional undergraduate degree and a Make Your Own Masters postgraduate studies has helped her in different ways as she explains “in hindsight, I feel like I needed to go to CSM in order to develop as a person” as someone who went straight from A-levels into year one with no foundation, she felt underdeveloped in comparison to her fellows; making it her mission to push herself harder throughout her studies. She notes that without traditional academia, she wouldn’t have been able to utilise an alternative education programme, “there is a need for almost both of them.”
Scaled up by Stacie Woolsey, Make Your Own Masters bridges the gap for creatives who wish to further educate themselves and elevate their skills within the creative industry, without the price tag that often restraints many. Dack elaborates on the shift of independent study as “you need to find your own way completely” — you are provided with the right people and specialists to connect with through MYOM to guide you. As daunting as that may sound in comparison to a traditional masters qualifications, it clearly allows for space to think outside the box freely.
Dack realised having a more niche practice during her studies that she wanted to follow and explore further:
“Creating my own masters, education of what I want to develop has been very helpful for me, because now I know what I want. And now I can go for it without any restraints or any pressure … I definitely couldn’t have done that without having the structure in place of MYOM, or it would have taken me a lot longer.”
And though that made her progress more accessible, her navigation process remains slightly more difficult than most as there seems to be no defined path, she highlights, “there isn’t much of a stepping stone. So that has been quite difficult to navigate for sure.” As someone who is still in the early days of their career, Dack has relied on conversing with others to explore different ideas. For example, “there is a space for it in the drag community, on catwalks, for an instillation pieces, etc.”
“I think it’s almost carving my own path. But it’s just through conversation. And that’s where is found my own way and inspiration, because it’s quite a hard thing to research.”
These conversations with friends and colleagues is how Dack discovered British-Cypriot, CSM alumni, Hussein Chalayan who “was doing it in the early 2000s… he called himself an artist, not a fashion designer”, pushing her to find inspirations from everyone and everything, and learning different phrases and how to talk to people about it. She also notes that it’s important to not look solely in the art work for support, many people are willing to support the arts; just have to find the right people.
“Communication is key, and being brave enough to say I’m doing this, and this is what I want to do, and see what advise or organisations know about that could help you, particularly artists.”
The liberty of creating her own path has allowed Dack to toy with different practice methodologies, and “trying to discover new engineering possibilities” and figuring out how to use it on the body, giving her “the time to learn the engineering aspects” that she may not have the knowledge to do as the engineering part of her work has been self-taught.
One of Dack’s highlights thus far has been being accepted to present a fashion design for the British Museum’s Manga Exhibit in 2019, which started her passion for merging engineering and art. Tasked to create a garment inspired by Manga under the late Kansai Yamamoto’s mentorship, Dack and her collaborator merged their performance and fashion background to create a garment that changed and evolved; which Yamamoto expressed to be his favourite of the show.
Dack’s currently showing her work-in-progress exhibit, happening from 15th March — 24th March 2024.
