Events & Activations
Aluminium tubular structures with printed stretch fabric skins
Aluminium tubular structures dressed in custom printed stretch fabric for Holman at Queen's University, produced by dye sublimation on Procura hardware and media. On a tube-frame build the graphic is not applied to a finished object; the graphic is the finish, and the pattern has to be developed from the frame.
What the job demanded
A tubular structure has no flat faces to print for. The frame is a three-dimensional shape made from bent and jointed round section, and the fabric skin has to travel over corners, radii and changes of plane while staying visually taut everywhere. That is a pattern-making problem more than a printing one: a skin cut to the frame's exact measurements will hang loose, because stretch fabric only looks right when it is working. Campus environments add their own conditions. Structures are usually assembled and taken down by staff or students rather than a specialist crew, they are stored between uses, and they sit in circulation space where anyone can walk into them, so the hardware has to be light enough to handle and blunt enough to be safe.
How it was produced
The skins were dye sublimated onto knitted stretch polyester. Disperse dye is transferred into the fibre under heat and pressure so the colour lives inside the yarn, which is what allows a printed fabric to be stretched hard over a frame without the image thinning, cracking or showing the strain. The pattern was developed from the frame geometry with a deliberate negative tolerance, so the finished skin is slightly smaller than the structure and goes on under tension. Skins were sewn with a zip closure along a discreet edge, which lets them be pulled over the assembled frame and then closed off. Procura tubular hardware assembles on push-fit connectors, numbered so the same structure goes together the same way each time and stores in a fraction of its built volume.
