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Jenny Nulty

Jenny is a young Irish designer and artist. Spending her childhood growing up in Cavan, she has always had a fascination with nature, society, emotions, and the world around her. She has grown up being driven by curiosity and this is evident in the work that she creates. Her work is motivated by her inquisitiveness and appreciation of all living things. Her imagination allows her to explore everyday life through a creative and artistic lens. She works predominantly with an analog style to propel her designs in a charming and exciting way. She uses her analog style in harmony with the typographic and technical skills she learned in her Visual Communications degree to create work that is honest, delicate, and conceptually driven.

Hanging by a thread

‘Hanging by a Thread’ is a collaborative campaign with Oxfam. It is aimed at all consumers of fast fashion, particularly teens and young adults as they have been proven to be the age group that buys fast fashion the most, particularly online. This campaign simultaneously contrasts the high level of greed which exists in the world and the enormity of fast fashion consumed with the exploitation of fast fashion workers in Bangladesh. This contrast is visually displayed through receipts and an atmospheric representation of fast fashion sweatshops in Bangladesh. Bangladesh’s economy is mostly dependent on the textile and garment industry, with the sector accounting for around 80% of the country’s exports. There are 3.5 million factory workers in Bangladesh; many of whom work long hours in cramped, dangerous conditions, often without any financial protection or employee rights.

Although retailers such as Pretty Little Thing, Missguided, and ASOS offer clothing to customers that cost from as little as €2, the fast fashion industry is having a detrimental effect on our planet. Not only is the clothing being produced with synthetic fibres such as polyester, which are harmful to our environment, the affordability of the clothing leaves its value easily diminishable, leaving 57% of all disregarded clothing in landfills.

The anchor of this campaign is an installation piece which aims to evoke an emotional response in the viewer and pleads with them to take a stance against fast fashion suppliers and the unfair conditions for the factory workers. This approach aims to evoke empathy, distress, and horror in the viewer. If the viewers start to refuse fast fashion and begin to demand fair conditions for workers, the cost of clothing would increase, which would in turn decrease the overconsumption and thus reduce waste. This would ensure that garment making remained a huge source of income and employment for developing countries such as Bangladesh while reducing the exploitation of these workers. The reduction in fast fashion production coupled with the increase in clothing prices would also minimise landfills and pollution for our environment.

I hope that this design can inspire even one consumer to make a leap and take a stance against the fast fashion industry that is leaving lives hanging by a thread.

Ambitious Cities

This project is my response to the RSA 2022 ‘Ambitious Cities” moving pictures brief.

This design is a video animation that provides an honest display of how the cities we live in are robbing and destroying the Earth’s natural resources for their own benefit. The project’s aim is to create a visual animation which educates people about our cities and where the resources, values, and morals that define them have come from. The project aims to teach the viewers how their choices, big or small, can dramatically change the Earth, for better or for worse. It is aimed at teenagers and young adults as they are young enough to still have many years left living on Earth but are also mature enough to make a change. The animation is composed of many still frame photographs of scenes that were created using organic materials such as mud, grass, and foliage, along with unnatural elements such as plastic bags, cigarettes, sweet wrappers, and synthetic materials. These man-made materials were salvaged from the litter and portray the abundance of waste on our planet while also representing the damage that we are doing to the Earth.

Through an observational study of the link between our cities, the story of ‘The Garden of Eden’ and the effect that natural and artificial materials have on the Earth, viewers will gain an understanding of these issues by the storyline of this animation and the materials used to express it. By visually representing Adam and Eve’s fall from grace through an apple, the viewers will recognise our generation’s fall from grace by the way that we treat the Earth and its resources. The use of mud, grass and a real apple contrast with the plastics and synthetic materials and help the viewers to understand our city’s morals and values towards nature. It also allows space for the viewers to develop sympathy for the Earth. Ultimately, this project seeks to build an understanding that it is possible for us to adapt our cities to thrive can in an environment that doesn’t depend on diminishing all of our planet’s resources to survive.