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Connor studies BA (Hons) Visual Art at Canterbury School of Visual Arts and has been working on his final project as part of his undergraduate degree.
He was invited to promote his project at the ‘Floating Resilience’ exhibition in partnership with University for the Creative Arts; bringing together local emerging creative talents to highlight and reimagine sea waste and humans’ impact on the planet.
Connor’s project was an “immersive virtual reality experience showing the capabilities of digital fashion and virtual reality technology that is inspired by sea life”.
The project formed the centre piece of the collaborative exhibition and featured a 7-foot high, 11-foot wide dome constructed from reinforced cardboard and illustrated with ocean microorganisms inspired graphics, inspired by Ernst Haeckel’s work.
Connor said: “The dome is inspired by illustrations of geometric shapes that you see in cells and plant life under a microscope, as seen in Haeckel’s book ‘Art Forms in Nature’”.
“I was really inspired by the way Haeckel used colours in his illustrations and I have used base colours of green and blue and other accent colours on each section of the dome”.
Connor designed a digital collection of clothes inspired by sea-life and created a digital fashion show, which was projected as an animated virtual reality video, giving viewers the “feeling of being inside the digital environment”. The pieces were animated to replicate the movement of plants and sea animals.
The collection comprised of two parts – the first highlighting the damaging effects the traditional fashion industry is having on the ocean and how waste is distributed by the ocean. The second part included more brightly coloured garments and showed the beauty of the ocean life that human buying behaviour is destroying.
“The whole concept of the project promoting the beauty of ocean life and raising awareness of the damages the fashion industry is having on the ocean, whilst exploring how digital clothing is a possible alternative for our online personas,” said Connor.
Connor plans to run a digital fashion business with his brother after completing his degree.
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