Ever and Again: Rethinking Recycled Textiles

This AHRC funded, three-year project aims to investigate textiles recycling, looking to the textile design practitioner to propose environmental improvement through the creation of innovative, high quality, ‘upcycled’ artefacts.

Recycling textiles saves energy and, if no recolouration takes place, it can save water and chemicals too. Most other recycled design exhibitions have focused on ‘good everyday design’, showing other design disciplines and failing to present new work within fashion/textiles (see Re(f)use, 2001, Waste to Taste, Sotheby’s, London 2003).

This exhibition documents research work by eleven TED designers, five guest artists and international designers, and eighteen Chelsea graduates, who since October 2005 have been examining and considering textiles recycling and the use of new engineering technologies, long life / short life textiles, ethical production, and systems/services. These concepts have to date been explored over two years via an adapted action research methodology with cycles of team workshops and periods of personal reflection.

This exhibition sought to both showcase the outcomes and also gain further insight and understanding in the form of feedback from a variety of external audiences. The gallery questionnaire and forum sessions provided the structure for comment from invited experts in the field, design students and graduates, school children, and the general public (building on the ‘Well Fashioned’ exhibition audience). Catalogue forewords by Lucy Siegle (The Observer) and Sarah Scaturro (Cooper Hewitt, New York) provided external comment on the integrity and quality of the project workshop process and outcomes.

The feedback will be used to inform Stage 3 of the project which culminates at the ‘Ever & Again’ conference in October 2008. The final outcomes will form a chapter about recycling and reuse in a book authored by Rebecca Earley. The exhibition will tour to New York in October 2008 courtesy of Designtex and the Association of Contract Textiles

Rebecca can be described as a practice-based textile design researcher in that her research integrates designing both as a mode of investigation and communication of research outcomes. This practice component encompasses a wide range of design related activities. For example, she produces hand and digitally printed textiles for her own label, undertakes public art projects and commissions, and is an educator, facilitator and curator.

• http://www.tedresearch.net
• http://www.beckyearley.com
• http://www.tfrg.org.uk
• http://www.5ways.info