Felicia Hansen
Fashion and Textile Design MA
The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås
Graduates: 2022
Specialisms: Textile Innovation/Textile Art / Fine Art / Sustainable Design
My location: Boras, Sweden
Felicia Hansen
First Name: Felicia
Last Name: Hansen
University / College: The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås
Course / Program: Fashion and Textile Design MA
Graduates: 2022
Specialisms: Textile Innovation/Textile Art / Fine Art / Sustainable Design
My Location: Boras, Sweden
About
Felicia Hansen is a textile designer and artist with a passion for sustainable approaches within the field of textile design. She has a soft spot for colour, texture, and atypical materials and for the last two years, she has been defining the core of her textile practice. In most of her current work, she dismantles discarded stuffed animals to create sustainable art and atypical interior designs.
Felicia has a five-year design education from The Swedish School of Textiles, where she first specialised in weaving in her bachelor's degree, before moving to a more textile general practice circulating repurposing post-consumer waste from the toy industry. She is currently based in Borås, Sweden, but hopes to relocate soon.
Felicia offers a variety of textile services, please contact her if you want to do a collaboration.
Teddy vessels [also known as our former best friends]
Teddy bears have become a universal symbol of our childhood, but we tend to forget them when we grow up. The toy industry is a growing empire where manufacturers constantly compete for consumers' attention. This results in growing waste from the toy industry and a need to find solutions to how to deal with it. This research explores repurposing possibilities of discarded stuffed animals based on their colour, form, texture, and print to create sculptural textile objects through deconstruction, patchwork, and sculpting techniques. This research was conducted by performing a series of design experiments exploring discarded stuffed animals through deconstruction and time-limited sketching. This allowed various sculptural objects to be constructed mainly by crazy pathworking and casting with different plaster materials or teddy bear filling. The outcome is a collection of 7 textile objects with a suggestive function, but the material it is constructed in challenges it. They extend from recognisable vase forms to forms that almost are unrecognisable. These objects place themselves in the field of not only textile design but also functional art. This research contributes to the field of textile design by suggesting a new usage for an atypical material, discarded stuffed animals. Furthermore, the collection Teddy Vessels [also known as our former best friends] proves that discarded stuffed animals still have a place in our lives even though we have forgotten them. @felicia_oh