Arts Thread

My initial direction for this project was influenced by the book Otherlands, which crafts a vivid and foreign, yet familiar, world through text depicting flora and fauna throughout Earth's history, informed by fossil records. I chose to specifically focus on China 125 million years ago. The project is further enriched by a combination of historically accurate flora, reimagined through primary research trips to Kingston Lacy’s kitchen gardens, the Natural History Museum's prehistoric garden, and the Eden Project. I also explored fauna such as crocodiles, snails, and insects, informed by visits to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Longleat Safari Park, and the Bournemouth Natural Science Society. I focused on illustrative elements, texture, and abstraction capturing a transition between visual clarity and impressionistic states. This delivers a visual world that remains open to interpretation by the viewer, inviting active creation and world-building to continue beyond the work’s origin. This project explores themes surrounding performance and adornment, drawing parallels between the natural world and human forms of self-expression suggesting them as one and the same. Markings are used as a form of visual communication, with adaptation and camouflage echoing the resilience of marginalised groups. It celebrates diversity through the education and exploration of gender and sex in nature. Historical and contemporary Chinese influences are brought in, illuminated by research trips to Hong Kong and Taiwan, visits to the V&A Museum, and secondary references such as China: The Three Emperors 1662–1795 and Vogue China. I focused on ‘doorways’ as symbols of transportation and journeying through time as organisms do and how we experience the layers of a place, both past and present. I considered how graffiti could represent human influence in a world untouched by it symbolic of the marks we leave behind. These ideas combine with geometric influences to represent contemporary enmeshment. My work has a multifaceted conceptual undercurrent, bringing attention to the suggestion of presence: to not rest on your laurels and to find beauty in small things approaching the mundane with curiosity. There’s an awareness of the blessing it is to explore life at our own pace, and of our mortality, and our capacity for research, thought, and connection. It seeks to expand minds toward the true diversity of Earth. It is also a form of creative activism in a turbulent political landscape approached through representation, education, and celebration. The context of this project is to provide fashion-conscious, neurodivergent consumers with sensory-seeking and soothing textile options. It also examines the importance of identity and expression within a historically infantilised minority group. Sensory needs, identity, and expression are all fluid, and I want to represent this within my designs considering flexibility, interchangeability, and customisation, including the ability to shift from sensory soothing to sensory seeking. This is made possible by utilising my own recipe of processes: from hand illustration and digital print, through to CAD embroidery, laser cutting, embellishment, silicone casting, and innovative hard and soft surface manipulation.