The Bartlett
Summer Show 2026
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Keratin

Project details

Programme
Year Year 3/4
Year 3

This project explores how contemporary technological systems manage bodily boundaries, hygiene, and biological residue through increasingly procedural and industrialised forms of control. The research began with lobster-processing technologies, where ethical discomfort is not removed but reorganised through machinery, automation, and technical protocols. Influenced by Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection in Powers of Horror, the project focuses on fingernails as a material that exists in an unstable condition between attachment and rejection, body and waste. Commonly treated as an insignificant everyday discard, nails remain connected to systems of bodily maintenance, health, hygiene, and consumer care. In response, the project constructs a fictional biomedical brand called Keratin™, which transforms the ordinary act of nail trimming into an exaggerated technological procedure. Through speculative devices, rotating mechanical systems, and staged processing rituals, the project explores how bodily material becomes increasingly regulated, managed, and technologised. The resulting device exists somewhere between speculative product, technological prop, and interactive installation.

Product Launch: Final Device Visualisation

Product Launch: Final Device Visualisation

Product Launch: Final Device Visualisation

Product Launch: Final Device Visualisation

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The Bartlett
Summer Show 2026
25 June – 12 July
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