Stitches is a sculptural data visualisation piece which visualised the colours of clothing in relationship to gender.

Clothing is more than just pieces of fabric. They can carry many significant details according to their shape, colour, pattern or embroidery techniques. Through observation of an individual’s clothing style, assumptions could be made about such person’s identity.. This led me to think, sex and gender are not perfectly binary, therefore why should clothes be?

My aim for the Open Share project was to revise my Data Visualisation final piece and develop and refine it’s final presentation. I worked with Processing software to edit this data’s layout, mapping the data in a dial like format and then connecting these marked points with lines, resulting in abstract shapes. I designed three; one representing the colours of men’s clothing, another representing females and the last design showing the total number of bodies documented. These shapes were then layered to create an embroidery stencil. I wanted to manipulate the materials to create a focal point, so I stitched the designs into the fabric and gathered the material around the threads. I wanted the design to be a flesh tone to represent skin and the fabrics to be flowy to represent movement, this bringing the design 'to life'. After photographing the final work, I layered the initial stencil back into the design to give the piece some context and understanding, and to look almost like a movement tracker software would.