Kate S

CV



Blue Water, Black Magic
NZ Maritime Museum
Junior Designer & Illustrator
  Workshop E
NZ Maritime Museum, Auckland
2019



Blue Water, Black Magic is a museum-wide exhibition at the New Zealand Maritime Museum. The exhibition is divided into three key narratives: the history of sailing and boat building on the Waitematā Harbour, America’s Cup sailing, and the legacy of Sir Peter Blake.

I worked as a junior designer under the lead exhibition designer, contributing across all three narrative zones of the museum.



 Using Adobe Illustrator, I was responsible for creating all wall decal illustrations, which included New Zealand developed boat models, America’s Cup racer foils, and detailed rigging components. These illustrations needed to be both technically accurate based on construction and technical plans and stylistically aligned with the surrounding exhibition design.

In addition, I collaborated with the lead designer to wireframe the interactive experience Design a Yacht. This digital installation guided visitors through the stages of racer boat construction, allowing them to make choices about materials, features, and styling. Their custom-designed yachts were then digitally raced alongside other visitors’ creations, with performance compared to Team New Zealand’s hydrofoil racers using modelled speed data. Working alongside Sarah-Jane Blake, daughter of Sir Peter Blake, I was responsible for bringing a scene from her sailing storybook Cat and Owl to life. Using a reference illustration from the book, we collaboratively prototyped and created a 60-litre 3D diorama of the scene. The final piece was constructed using a combination of clay models, 3D-printed elements, and found objects carefully layered and suspended between Perspex sheets and encased within a solid resin block to create depth and dimension.


This was the orginal sceth given by the artist.
It was my job to create a 3D, 80L diarama from this sketch.
Cardboard prototyping of layering technique to create depth.
Clay modelling of Sarah Janes, “Cat and Owl” Characters.