Rendered Invisible is a 1 minute and 20 second animated short examining gender specific exploitation within global corporate supply chains. Situated in a representative garment factory in Cambodia, the work draws on the research, findings, and calls for gender-responsive lawmaking outlined in Chapter 4, Modern Slavery - Gender the law: The Regulation of Supply Chain Exploitation of Ramona Vijeyarasa’s book Rewriting the Rules. The short animation focuses on the labour conditions experienced by women that underpin the everyday clothing items we consume. It narrows into more precise ways of calling out exploitation in garment factories, calling for legislation and accountability frameworks that explicitly address gender, given that garment supply chains disproportionately rely on women’s labour.

The work is grounded in the premise that consumption cannot be separated from production. Clothes do not appear magically; they are made by people, within specific economic, social and political conditions. Yet Western cultural trends of mass consumption routinely erase this labour. The invisibility of workers is not incidental, but structurally embedded within global supply chains that distance consumers and corporate decision-makers from those most affected by their choices.

Rendered Invisible seeks to inform audiences about the gendered nature of exploitation and to gesture toward what kinds of change might be demanded. By making visible the specific experiences of women workers, the animation aims to bring those most affected back to the centre of the conversation. Visibility, here, is not the end of the story, but a necessary condition for accountability. Consulting those most affected by exploitative labour practices is framed not as a symbolic gesture, but as essential to meaningful reform across supply chains.

Animation is used deliberately as the medium for this work. Its capacity for abstraction, symbolism and narrative compression allows complex systems to be addressed without trivialising the realities they produce. The animation opens with workers rendered literally invisible as sewing machines operate and garments appear to be produced effortlessly. As the work unfolds, it moves into speculative visualisations of what accountability moving up the supply chain might look like. Women workers gather in a break room, writing down the changes they demand to their working conditions. These written demands float upward through the supply chain, eventually arriving in a corporate boardroom of large brand buyers. The sequence imagines decision-making structures in which women’s voices and lived experience are not marginal, but central.

Through visual techniques such as composition, repetition, pattern, colour and sound design, the work constructs an embodied sense of the factory environment. Repetitive movements and looping actions evoke the relentless rhythm of production, where no seat is empty and no second is wasted. Tight framing and compressed spaces suggest both physical and psychological constraint, while the persistent green hue of industrial lighting produces a quiet but ongoing sense of unease.

By combining Rewriting the Rules’ reconceptualisation of women’s rights in law with the symbolic language of animation, Rendered Invisible invites viewers to reflect on their own position within these systems. Clothes do not appear by magic, and the conditions they are made in matter.