Quadrat was my final project at the Royal College of Art, developed in collaboration with menswear designer Peter Maxwell Smith in 2007.

The project grew from my experience of Shanghai in 2006 and research for my dissertation on supermodernity: the accelerated, fragmented condition of the contemporary city and its effect on perception and identity.

I began to think of the pixel as a contemporary unit of representation — a fragment capable of carrying colour, information and identity. There was something of Pop Art in its immediacy and repetition, and something of Cubism in the simultaneous fragmentation and reconstruction of an image.

Working with Peter allowed these ideas to move from image into clothing and the body. Colour, scale and digital fragmentation were translated across garments, turning the figure into a moving surface within the urban environment.

Quadrat became one of the first expressions of a language that would continue to develop throughout my work: the individual unit accumulating into pattern, image and system.