Q&A Event: 6pm Wednesday 5 March / All Welcome
Boudicca in conversation with Jonathan Faiers, author of Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film

Boudicca is an avant-garde studio, founded in 1997 by Zowie Broach and Brian Kirkby, whose innovative work eloquently yet disobediently explores the creative territories between and beyond the worlds of art and design. Initially showing through galleries and exhibition spaces, Boudicca went on to present collections in London and New York, becoming the first independent British fashion house to be invited as a guest member of the prestigious Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in 2007.

Boudicca’s fearlessly uncompromising working methods are both meticulously considered and emotionally charged. The duo’s richly researched work takes direct reference from cultural and political history, science and technology, nature and landscape, exploring the tailored silhouette whilst simultaneously exploiting a multitude of new disciplines – including 3D printing, processing, coding, film and chrono-photography – in an effort to examine, re-define, deconstruct and atomise fashion and identity. They strive for all their work to cause collision and rupture in known landscapes in order to create upheaval, describing their practice as ‘a hunt for the invisible’, a casting up of all possibilities, experiments, history, identity, design, landscape, sound, body, breath, narrative, to form an alchemic persuasion new to ourselves.

For their Stanley Picker Fellowship, Boudicca have been exploring the continued integration of digital imaging and the moving image as expressive mediums within their wider studio practice. Referencing the cultural history of the Gallery’s island-location and the surrounding Hogsmill River – its upstream river banks immortalised in Sir John Everett Millais renowned painting Ophelia (1851-52) – The Liquid Game is an immersive audio-visual installation that exploits the architecture of the Gallery, provoking a sensory response in the viewer that highlights their corporal presence in the exhibition space.

Boudicca have previously presented work at the Royal Opera House, Kensington Palace, Haunch of Venison Yard and Somerset House in London, FIT New York, Centraal Museum Amsterdam and Arnhem Biennale. Their work was recently shown in Fashioning the Object at The Arts Institute of Chicago (2012) and in Glasstress with the London College of Fashion in Venice and London (2013), and was selected by Dr. Valerie Steele for her Greatest Designers A-Z published by Taschen (2013).