Creating a link between research and technology is the aim of academic teaching at the Durban University of Technology (DUT).

For the DUT’s international fashion photographer, designer and lecturer, Nirma Madhoo-Chipps, her creative inputs have not gone unnoticed with her recently receiving the ‘Creative Outputs Of The Year Award’ at the 2017  DUT Research Awards.

The Fashion and Textile lecturer was recently awarded by DUT for her contribution for the fashion film Labtayt Sulci, which showed at Aesthetica Short Film Festival in York. This film festival is BAFTA accredited.

The fashion film, Labtayt Sulci, combines natural and digital landscapes to create a dreamy, “otherworldly” experience with a futuristic and surrealistic feel. Her work is informed by post-humanist and futurist thinking and aesthetics.

“The film is inspired by Nasa’s explorations of Saturn’s moons by the Cassini expedition. Digital renderings of Enceladus are of evocative ice-blue textured surfaces. There are accounts of an icy crust over a warm ocean that may hold extraterrestrial life. These images are digitally rendered, not entirely realistic, but they captured my imagination,” she said.

Describing herself as ‘culturally hybrid’ and as an ‘accidental nomad’, Mauritian-born Madhoo moved to South Africa in 1998 and now considers Durban as her home.

The petite and dynamic lecturer is constantly looking at innovative ways of infusing research and technology with fashion. She is currently engaged in practice-based research of fashion film as new media with particular focus on the development of the fashion film as genre as well as new imaging technologies such as those that the Virtual Reality technology and platforms provide.

Besides exploring her remarkable talents with the world, she also thoroughly enjoys working with students at DUT. She has worked on a collaborative project with BTech Fashion student Jessica Shuttleworth, which was submitted to the NIHSS Awards 2018. “We were shortlisted and ended up as runner-up to the winning project. The project with Jessica Shuttleworth is an example of transformative and collaborative learning in a creative context. I hope to do more of this going forward,” she said excitedly.

She also stated that as mentor (Nirma Madhoo) and mentee (Jessica Shuttleworth) in the course of Shuttleworth’s BTech study, their rapport evolved into a much more fluid relationship which has seen the co-authorship of a body of practical work which is planned for further expansion this year, 2018.

To learn more of the project, go to http://www.anatomythestudio.com/digital-fashion-praxis

Pictured: Nirma Madhoo-Chipps

Waheeda Peters