Henrietta Maria’s Story
Tyvek Costume and Projection Mapping
This project began as a way to integrate all my passions and experience. I wanted to create an exhibition that would use technology and costume to create an experience within historical environments that would be cost effective and easy to maintain. I was inspired by the Tyvek costumes at Hampton Court Palace by Mark Wallis and Stephanie Selmayr, these ghostly figures provided a good background for art and visuals.
Through combining costume and technology, I aimed to appeal to audiences who don’t normally engage with history through books and reading and entice members of the public to visit historical locations they otherwise may not.
The costume element is very important to this project as the style, silhouette, and structure needed to be as accurate as possible for the period. This meant building up a stand to represent the underlayers of the garment and then using different mediums (paper and calico) to build up a pattern for the costume, using references from pattern books and extant garments. I was able to make a pattern and transfer this to Tyvek. The Tyveks I chose were a smooth 75gsm and 55gsm from Spenic Ltd which were malleable but stiff like paper and untearable like fabric, meaning I needed to take care about how it folded and draped to resemble fabric the most.
I chose the historical figure Henrietta Maria as I believe she had an interesting life and I wanted to highlight a strong warrior queen whose story is not known to many in our country. She defended her husband, Charles I, and travelled around the continent gathering money and troops for her husband’s fight against Cromwell. Although, as a Catholic queen, she may have been the reason behind the war in the first place.
After making the pattern using a 1633 portrait by Van Dyke of the notorious Queen as a reference, I cut out my pieces and built the costume up layer by layer, sewing it together like you would a traditional costume. I boned the stomacher with synthetic whalebone - which I used so it would not absorb moisture and turn mouldy - and used a metal chain braid from Barnett Lawson to decorate the borders of the bodice and skirt.
The next challenge was the cuffs, which I combated by using industrial coffee filters. As this material is not as sturdy as Tyvek, I made these removable so they can be replaced easily if damaged. I then printed the collar using silk-screen printing; the stencil was hand-drawn by myself and was made using motifs from Charles I’s own falling band collar as a tribute.
The stand was also adjusted to Henrietta Maria’s predicted height, which I calculated from portraits of her and Charles I together and contemporary descriptions.
Once the costume had been sculpted and put together it was time to bring it to life with projection mapping. To accurately create a 3D projection map of the dress, I firstly needed an accurate 3D model of it.
To achieve this, I collaborated with Preevue Ltd. The first step in the process was to complete a LiDAR laser scan of the finished garment, capturing the full dress in 3D to millimetre accuracy. To scan the entire dress, we needed to scan it from multiple different angles and combine the positions together in software to produce a single point cloud.
Next, we isolated the point cloud of the dress from the room ready to be meshed from the scan using RealityCapture. The resulting 3D mesh had around 25 million polygons so needed to be simplified, remeshed and retopologised so it could be used to create content and within the mapping software. We used Meshlab and Instant Meshes to complete this.
With the clean 3D model made, the unwrapped UVs became the template to build the video content – a stylised biographical journey of Henrietta Maria, narrated and set to music.
On the day of the installation, we used multiple projectors being powered by MadMapper to map the content around all sides of the real-life garment.
The installation played on loop, with projection, music and voice-over narration produced from letters from Henrietta Maria to Charles I before he was executed in 1649.