Belonging
What is home? Beyond a physical place, home is a feeling – one shaped by safety, belonging, memory, and the small sensory details we carry with us. Project Beyond Home explores what happens when we leave a familiar home behind and begin searching for, constructing, and redefining a sense of belonging elsewhere. Rooted in memories of childhood in a countryside home, the project draws inspiration from spaces where objects and materials had long lives, imperfections were embraced, and almost nothing was discarded. Geometric forms evoke the structures and spaces we inhabit, while organic lines reflect tenderness, warmth, and personal memory. Through garments and spatial elements, the project moves beyond the idea of home as a fixed location and presents it as something we can carry, reconstruct, and continuously reshape.
Sensory Space
Beyond Home expands fashion beyond the body into a spatial and sensory installation. Biomaterial garments are presented alongside suspended biomaterial elements, transforming the exhibition space into an abstract landscape of fragments, surfaces, textures, and memories. The installation blurs the boundaries between garment, material, body, and environment, inviting visitors to experience fashion not only as something worn, but as a space that can be entered and felt. Through the interplay of modular openwork surfaces, organic forms, material textures, and spatial composition, the installation evokes the fragmented and deeply personal nature of memory. Together, the garments and installation create a temporary environment that reflects the experience of leaving one home behind and gradually constructing a sense of belonging somewhere new.
Material Cycles
The project translates this idea of transformation into its materials and construction. The pieces are created from an algae-based biomaterial developed by the designer, with agar – a polysaccharide derived from algae – as its main component. Made from natural, plant-based ingredients and coloured with mineral pigments, the material is biodegradable and offers an alternative to conventional synthetic and animal-derived materials. Rather than treating production remnants as waste, Beyond Home incorporates leftover biomaterial into new forms: larger offcuts become modular components, while smaller fragments can be reheated and transformed into new material. Modular construction allows elements to be assembled, disassembled, rearranged, and given new functions. In this way, Beyond Home understands sustainability as an ongoing cycle of adaptation, much like our relationship with home itself: changing, imperfect, reconstructed, yet continuously carrying traces of what came before.
