This spring, CCA Fashion Design students addressed questions about garment use while participating in Local Wisdom, an ongoing international fashion research project that examines how we use, share, and engage with our clothes.

Several student projects selected as finalists will be featured in spring 2014 in a participatory symposium and exhibition in London, along with work from six other international design schools.

Bruno Fazzolari (Fine Arts faculty)

I have had my studio in this building, a Victorian in the Mission District of San Francisco, for nearly 20 years. My working area is spread across three rooms of the domestic space.

The smallness of the rooms limits my work to a human scale, something that is important to me. I've always been intrigued by photographs of early Modernist painters working in apartments or sitting rooms cluttered with rugs, doilies, and decorative china.

Abstract painting is a sort of mash-up of the decorative and the sublime, the ordinary and the numinous. Lately I've been formulating perfumes to include with paintings. Perfume is another kind of abstraction. The perfumes are inspired by Blinky Palermo's wall drawings, which were mash-ups of decoration, abstraction, architecture, and being.

Photography by Andria Lo

Linda Geary
(Painting/Drawing chair)

My studio is in West Oakland (a few doors down from Zarouhie Abdalian’s). I keep a designated area for my works on paper, collages, and color archive, and the rest of the space is for using oil paint.

The view faces east toward larger loft spaces across the street, along with a few residential rooftops and the Oakland hills beyond. Late in the day, the windows across the street function like a giant mirror or clock that reflects the light, weather, and the sunset.

Photography by Andria Lo

Curtis Arima (Jewelry / Metal Arts 1998, now Jewelry / Metal Arts faculty)

My studio is in the Sawtooth Building in West Berkeley. It is a historic structure, built to house the Kawneer Company factory in 1913, and then later home to the Sealy Mattress Company.

I specialize in ancient jewelry and metalworking practices that are no longer in widespread use in industry because of their time-consuming nature. I want to honor their history and continue their legacy while having a contemporary conversation.

Even though my studio is divided into a retail space and a making space, the "threshold" is transparent; the intent is for people who visit the retail space to be able to see and connect with my processes of making and understand more about what they are looking at and buying.

The studio is definitely an extension of my artistic brain. The aesthetic and functional aspects are totally intertwined. This is also exciting when clients and the public come in, as it allows them access to parts of my artistic process that they'd otherwise never see.

Photography by Andria Lo