I am a designer, maker, researcher and educator. These facets of my design / scholarly practice converge in enquiries around the nature of knowledge. I am interested in how embodied knowledge or ways-of-knowing of a place or from lived experience, are often devalued in favour of industry standards (in the case of design) or canonical knowledge (in the case of art).
My current collaborative research project Critical Fitting looks at how design education can use decolonial thinking to generate creatively fruitful design research whilst conceptually challenging a ‘one-world world’. Critical Fitting is a curriculum intervention that uses sensory methods to include and revalue embodied knowledge over modern, universal ways-of-knowing.
My background is in fashion design. I currently teach on the MA Womenswear course at London College of Fashion. In my post as Senior Lecturer in Creative Patterncutting I support postgrads in craft, design and 3D realisation of their practice-based research projects. Proximity to materials and hands-on experimental sampling are core methods in my teaching. I strongly promote a values-led pedagogy that encourages future-designers to explicitly consider their ethical red lines.
My design approach foregrounds the ontological and the relational – I believe that design objects don’t just represent but enact practices in their worlds. My current studio practice focuses on scagliola plasterwork where I explore knowledge-building through haptic encounters and open-ended process of making.
I am currently researching for a range of maverick furniture based on Irish hedge schools of the 1700’s. These rural schools were illegally operating through the Irish language during the Penal Laws. As an aesthetic and conceptual counterpoint, the project also draws from contemporaneous Georgian Dublin architectural design where craft-knowledge moved in-around imperial modernity.
o.hegarty@arts.ac.uk
