wavey.forms

your sound: your style

Mary’s work explores digital visualisations of sound, which she has used to develop her start-up business: wavey.forms. Creating unique custom clothing, prints and accessories from music and sound, with the first ranges launching now at waveyforms.com. 

Influenced by Vilem Flusser’s ‘Technical Image’ as a common language for all of society, she uses computer generated imagery, revealing contemporary ways to interpret sound. Waveforms and spectrograms show fluctuations in volume, pitch and rhythm, creating graphics which can be read and understood (to varying degrees) by almost any audience. The work uses CMYK as its signature colour range, considering the ways parts create a harmonious whole (e.g., instruments in music), as well as the translation from digital to physical space. 

After several years creating work which investigated the digital/physical boundaries, in search of ways to understand and survive the modern landscape, wavey.forms provided Mary with a lens to focus these enquiries: audio is translated to image digitally, then digital data becomes physical product. The work uses a range of production processes, focussing on methods which stay true to that original data. Sustainable direct-to-garment printing is used to create the initial clothing ranges, featuring waveform and spectrogram imagery on organic cotton garments. A range of laser-cut acrylic jewellery, holographic stickers and custom phone cases offer fun ways to accessorise. 

Finally, large-scale textile piece ‘The Real’ is printed on speaker grille cloth, exploring notions of reality, informed by writings from scholar Michael Gallope, artist Hito Steyerl and musician Alison Wonderland. These pieces aim to work between and eliminate hierarchies of art, craft and design, the low-brow and high-brow, and provide an art-form accessible to all.