A student from St Albans has been part of a project to transform suitcases and bags abandoned by travellers at airports into art.

Teams of art and design students at Middlesex University, who were confronted with a range of personal belongings including a baseball bat, army uniform and teddy bear bookends when they opened the lost luggage, had four days to interpret and transform the contents for display in the university.

Louise Fogerty, a second year animation student at the university from St Albans, worked in the Lost Luggage exhibition.

She said: “We worked with people from different departments with different skills and came up with the idea of using the clothing as a canvas.

“Everyone knuckled down and managed to make pieces we wouldn’t be able to make within our own department. It was challenging at the start to come up with the right idea but everything came together and everyone contributed something valuable.”

Mastermind of the Lost Luggage project and lecturer in stop-motion animation at Middlesex University, Osbert Parker, said: “I’ve been thinking about creating Lost Luggage as a large scale project for three years and the result is an exciting combination of artists from different disciplines and year groups exchanging ideas and making work outside their comfort zones.

“This is the first time Middlesex University has created a collective project across all schools and departments in this way before and I’m very pleased with the results. It’s important for artists to talk and collaborate to find new ways of art and new ways of moving forwards to find something new.

“Students were asked to think about who the people that the items belonged to were and what the objects they left behind meant to them. The contents of the lost luggage inspired the groups to work together and communities have evolved over the creative artwork.”