Our series on our WearableArt™ themed windows at our Te Papa Stores continues with Jess from Queen Margaret College.
My name is Jessica Bunnell and I’m a year 13 Queen Margaret student studying fashion technology.
For my 2013 NCEA Materials Technology project, I was very privileged to be given the opportunity to make a WOW wearable art garment to be displayed in the window of the Te Papa Store on Brandon Street. I saw this as a great opportunity to make a unique garment that I would likely never make again and decided to create a garment with several different unconventional materials that I hadn’t worked with before.
My main design brief to follow from my client, Alexis Hawke (Te Papa), was to be inspired by a photographic image taken by one of the Te Papa photographers from their image collection, and to create an amazing garment with inspiration from this image. My chosen image was the Long Horn Beetle, and I saw that there was a lot of creative potential in this image. What really drew me to this image were the interesting shapes that were constructed within the beetle and also the very vibrant green colour it has that also contrasts with the black.
My original design idea of using different unconventional materials led me to investigate what could I make the garment from, and eventually I decided to use plastic soft drink bottles as part of the garment construction. I tested and manipulated the bottles with spray paint and heat-guns and worked out how to construct them in a way that was inspired by the long antennas from the beetle and its horns. This process so far has been very time consuming, but also fun to work with as it is a new process to me and the end result will hopefully catch the attention of people walking past the store. Overall the whole garment is coming along nicely and I am looking forward to having it displayed in Te Papa store on Brandon Street.
My plans in the future are to study a Bachelor of Design as I have a real passion for all areas of design especially fashion and photography.