Creative Career Stories: Interdisciplinary designer, Kialy Tihngang
Kialy Tihngang is an award-winning interdisciplinary designer based in Glasgow. Having recently graduated from Glasgow School of Art, Kialy left with a portfolio full of “Useless Machines” rather than the fabric samples you might expect from a Textile Design graduate. This is Kialy’s story…
“I am going to be a fashion designer!”
I was always super creative as a kid. I’ve been saying “I am going to be a fashion designer!" for as long as I can remember. My mum was supportive, and my dad was not unsupportive but just ambivalent. He pinned all his ambitions on my older brother, so I got off scot-free in a way and was allowed to just draw.
My school had plenty of physical resources, but they didn’t teach us about the creative industries. If you were interested in art, you were told that if you could do the most photo-realistic oil painting, then you might be able to paint portraits for a living. I remember feeling like you had only done a good piece of art if people said, “Oh my god - that looks like a photo!”.
An unexpected path
After school, I went and studied my foundation at Central Saint Martins, and it all went a bit downhill. I didn’t realise that they made you compete to get into the course you wanted after your foundation year was over. I applied to fashion but didn’t get in, so they put me on the jewellery course. I ended up dropping out of Saint Martins and going to study fashion at Kingston. This turned out not to be the right for me either, so I left and moved back home to Reading. I was unhappy for a while before I came to Scotland, and was a bit happier.
Dropping out was a big blow to my ego. I felt like the failure of my family and thought that I couldn’t go back into anything creative. The route of going to university, graduating and getting a job feels so set in stone, so any deviation from it felt like a personal failure. What’s funny is how dependent that is on your peer group. If I weren’t seeing all my friends’ graduation photos on Instagram, I am sure I wouldn’t have felt so bad. It took a few years before I felt like I could be creative again, but I did. And it turned out there was a world-class art school just down the road from me, so that was pretty handy.
Fashion or textiles?
Looking back, I always should have been studying textiles. For me, the silhouette of what I was designing was never my main consideration. Even when I was quite small, I was drawing different patterns on the same princess dress. At school, no one explained all the different jobs involved in fashion, like textile designers and pattern cutters. Even in an art school setting, no one asked whether I had thought about doing textiles instead of fashion.
“I went on to study textiles at GSA, but, much to my own surprise, I didn’t end up making lengths of fabric. ”
- Kialy Tihngang
I went on to study textiles, but, much to my surprise, I didn’t end up making lengths of fabric. I’ve learnt not to pay too much attention to what other people are doing and just to focus on the things I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid. Working on video content and object-based projects required a bit of explanation to my tutors, but it was worth it. The best part of my course was the final few months before the hand-in. This was the most stressful, sleep-deprived time, too, but seeing my years of skill-building finally pay off was so exciting. I have this “drop out” chip on my shoulder, so seeing my vision be fully realised felt like I was finally proving myself.
An isolated education
There were some challenging aspects of studying at art school, too. I went straight into the second year of the course, which I thought would be a smoother transition than it turned out to be. I get anxious in all sorts of social spaces, particularly when I feel like the odd one out, so I found it difficult to integrate into a year where everyone already knew each other and had sussed out how the school worked. I felt very much like an outsider. It is strange looking back because they were all such lovely people on my course, and no one specifically made me feel bad. My specific triggers made me feel like I was going to be lonely for the next three years, but I did end up making friends on the course.
I moved into my own flat in January of 2020, right before the pandemic happened. I ended up living alone for a year and feeling very, very isolated. Like many introverts, at first, I thought spending all this time alone would be pretty plain sailing, but, in reality, it was debilitating. Being trapped in a flat with nothing but my thoughts was not a good place to be. There were times in the year when I struggled to be productive at all, which was particularly difficult when I was trying to make work which would define the next chapter of my life. I ended up moving in with a flatmate and getting counselling through my university, which helped. My friends and family were all so supportive, too.
Make what you want to make
Going forward, making more video content and working on set designs, props, and standalone objects is where I want to go with my work. I want to make music videos too! I always have in a way, but it seems to be one of those career paths that there are so many routes down, none of which you are told about. Some filmmakers make music videos, but there are also animators, illustrators and all sorts of other creatives. Coming from a textiles background, it always felt like video wasn’t for me, but this past year has taught me that nothing is stopping me from doing it.
My advice for young creatives would be to try not to make what you think a textile designer, or whatever specialism you are interested in, should make. I used to look at amazing commercial textiles work and think: why is my brain not doing that? I wanted to make interesting objects out of cardboard, but didn’t think that was what textiles should be. My biggest piece of advice is that there is no “should”. You are in art school to make what you want to make, especially if you are paying nine grand a year to study. It doesn’t matter if you end up making something that doesn’t make sense for the title of your course or arguing with your tutors; a portfolio you are happy with is much more important than one which seems viable but is not really you.