BA Design Project
(2023)
An ongoing research project exploring how we could restore intimate relationships with nonhuman life.
A second skin: a garment to house the bodies of plants to enable skin to root contact.
Supporting imagery, from growing to prototype models imagining plants within the physical, human landscape.
Second Skins is a project concerned with challenging notions of humanness in order to better understand how we can live as a part of our environments rather than above them.
The human body, confined within the boundaries of skin and flesh, is a seemingly solitary creature. It separates itself from its ecosystem, removed and distanced, negating any facts that it is actually more nonhuman than ‘human’.
My research in Second Skins instead looks to expand the boundaries of our skin and asks us to consider the way in which we relate to and with plant life, and therefore the wider systems we are both a part of, to encourage the rebuilding of intimate and caring kinship between humans and nonhumans.
The living garment, or a second skin, facilitates an intimate encounter between two bodies, physically and visually weaving together the human landscape with a plant’s body.
Through building a relationship with the chia plant, I spent a year constantly rethinking the way that I interacted with the nonhuman world, and I hope that through interaction with this design project, I may encourage the same outcome for others.