KyCAD students are rethinking sculpture through movement, scale, and environment in the Wearables + Inflatables course. Blurring the line between fashion, performance, and object-making, students design and build large-scale inflatable forms meant to be worn, activated, and experienced in real time.

After developing their pieces in the studio, studentS take their work outside, installing and activating their inflatables in natural settings, where site-specific critiques push them to consider how their work interacts with the body, landscape, and audience.

The course is led by visiting artists Claire Ashley and Vincent Tiley, whose practices expand how we think about wearable forms. Scottish-born, Chicago-based artist Claire Ashley draws on painterly abstraction, monumental sculpture, and slapstick humor to explore inflatables as painting, sculpture, installation, and performance costume. Vincent Tiley, a New York–based artist originally from West Virginia, uses garment-based durational performance to investigate clothing as language, particularly how identity and community are expressed through style. Together, their perspectives offer students a dynamic, interdisciplinary approach to making work that exists both on and beyond the body.

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