Dorothy Chan
Dorothy Chan (@doryeek) was born and raised in Hong Kong, and now based in Swansea, South Wales. Dorothy lives under a combination of both eastern and western influences, significantly, the last few years in the Scandinavian design sector after her undergraduate studies in marketing.
Dorothy believes that "One will never fully understand how things actually work until you give it a try." The more she wrote about craftsmanship of furniture, interior and architecture designs, The more she discovered that it needed to be fully and practically explored.
Given that wood, glass, concrete and metal are the major materials in furniture design, glass is relatively more mystical and transcendent in terms of its contradictory natures and visible play with light and shadow.
Dorothy’s works serve as functional and timeless pieces in a tranquil sense of subtleness and delicacy that share everyday enlightenment.
Ways of doing:
- Through concentration and connection: by fully immersing herself with only the material in the process from fundamental materiality to immaterial levels
- By means of abstraction: discovering Dorothy’s way to visualise the surrounding energy and embedded complexities in an unspoken yet intimate language
- At present: by destructing the pieces that stopped and reconstruct to keep things flowing that tolerate variability and embrace possibilities.
Dorothy looks to different concerns within the overall harmony and coherence as much as the details in lines, shades and proportions. The level of translucency that acts to gather everything together, yet the slight difference between shades keeps the individuality and expand beyond to the sky. The invisible details of the installation are also designed such as centralising pieces with level of eye sights and space between pieces and overall traffic flow.
Speaking about her series ‘2’ Dorothy noted - “There are things that happened, are happening and are going to happen, but nothing lasts… The narrative is ever-changing, as we, the viewers are changing.”
"They were painted while I was less of a subject of creation but rather summoning to record the patterns I saw on the canvas, in terms of visualising the surrounding energy that encounters with my sensory at that particular moment." As the practice develops, the more detailed dots and lines are sketched, the more the pieces are returning to repetitive form of purity. In which, it is left to viewers’ interpretation based on their own situated knowledge that extended the pieces from simply an object to immaterial connections.
Studying in one of renowned stained glass centre in the world, the idea of making window panels can be traced back the student bursary trip with The Stained Glass Museum in April 2023, while also searching for ways to accommodate the ready-made 200+ glass pieces in project “2”. With the initial design at the scale of over 2 meters like traditional stained glass pieces as seen in churches, the design has been amended over the summer due to various concerns, mainly about “what’s next”.
As a result, panel one (about wholeness, neutrality) follows the traditional way of making-after-design with delicate drawing that echoes with project “2” and enamel screen printing background as an alternative to buying ready-made opaque glass sheets.
After that, panel two (about nothingness and fragmentation) is born with the intention of making a contrast to panel one in terms of having lead profiles as the major and making use of handful materials that were made throughout the year, which was commented by the specialists from the department as one of the most difficult way of making by adjusting size of glass along the process without a firm design beforehand.
When asked about what’s next for Dorothy she told us: "Stained glass is not the only technique that I was taught in the degree, glass fusing and plaster moulding are also the things that I would like to continue in the future. So, what about having the two together as highlighting the contrast of metal and glass as in stained glass panels, with also introducing the depth of three-dimensional experience in terms of sight and touch."
If you want to see more from Dorothy and follow her future practice, you can find her on Instagram and her website, linked below.