Sasha Heinsaar is awarded the 1 Granary mentorship prize, which involves one year of mentoring by founder Olya Kuryshchuk. “The future of fashion needs designers who are restlessly rethinking the way we make and consume fashion. Sustainability, originality, innovation, and industry awareness are all values that 1 Granary stands for and traits that as a platform want to award. Sasha's work is fearless, experimental and most importantly modern. As a designer who reflects on the current sociopolitical landscape, with a strong technical skillset and aesthetic eye, Sasha deserves to be supported and mentored in order to further explore sustainable fashion-making and craftsmanship,” says Olya Kuryshchuk.
For the Swedish School of Textile graduate Sasha Heinsaar, it’s all about making your own materials by hand and using already existing sources. This turned into a one-year-long yarn and textile craft material hunt throughout second-hand and thrift stores, as well as collecting unwanted materials from family and friends. The collection is based on Slavic folk fairy tales that she read throughout her childhood in Estonia. Whilst they are deemed naive and forgotten, the folktales carry valuable histories of countless generations. Heinsaar uses yarn-based craft techniques by abstracting symbols derived from folktales and their characters. Knitting, crocheting, weaving and patchwork techniques are innovated by integrating tale characters in wearable forms and details made out of disregarded deadstock yarn and textile craft materials. The work also comments on the current political climate in the Slavic region, and served as a Heinsaar’s creative outlet to react to the atrocious war started by the Russian government against the Ukrainian nation, “as well as both Belarussian and Russian people being held hostage under the tyranny and dictatorship of their presidents,” she says. Seeing the staple Slavic folktale narratives as metaphors for hope and change, new unexpected stories are knitted, crocheted, woven, embellished and stitched together out of the dismissed by the previous owners’ materials.
