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Selected Work  Sweat-to-Scent  Wetsuit  Air, Body, Apparatus   PiDog

Experiments  Obsidian  TEI Paper: Wetsuit  Research Dossier: Air, Body, Apparatus  CV
Research Dossier in Progress: Air, Body, Apparatus
In collaboration with Canada Goose & the National UK Ice Hockey Team
2025 - present
Indoor ice rinks are among the most polluted athletic environments in regular use, and almost no one inside them knows it. Fossil-fuelled ice resurfacers, ventilation systems left largely untouched since the mid-twentieth century, and the heavy breathing the sport demands combine to expose players, staff and spectators to carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ultrafine particulates and volatile organic compounds. Two decades of medical research link these conditions to exercise-induced bronchoconstriction and long-term decline in lung function — and women's hockey players appear especially at risk.

In this practice-based project, developed in collaboration with Canada Goose, I treat the enclosed rink as an invisible toxic landscape and propose a wearable sensing and bio-based filtration system built into the player's existing uniform rather than added as a separate device. The work runs across three strands: low-cost air-quality sensing tested in a controlled chamber and on-site at Streatham Ice Arena in London; bio-based filtration materials combining cellulose foams with activated charcoal, developed for integration into a helmet cartridge and jersey layer; and real-time visualisation in TouchDesigner that turns sensor data into spatial particle fields, making the invisible atmosphere of the rink perceptible.

Two ideas hold the project together. The first is the permeable athletic body — the athlete is not a sealed unit moving through neutral air, but a surface continuous with the atmosphere they draw deep into the lungs at every breath. The second, grounded in a consultation with a former UK national women's team player, is the materially regulated athletic uniform. Women's hockey already mandates comprehensive equipment, and integrating filtration into gear an athlete already wears does not register as dystopian in the way consumer devices like the Dyson Zone — with their pandemic-era associations — often do. Where uniform regulation already exists, it opens an under-recognised design space for wearable interventions that work for the athlete.

The contribution is a research prototype framework rather than certified protective equipment: a way of linking sensing, biofabrication and visualisation that makes a documented but neglected health concern visible, and argues that wearable filtration in sport can be approached as a material upgrade to existing uniforms rather than as one more thing to strap on.