ENGRAINED ︎ ENGRAINED ︎ ENGRAINED ︎ ENGRAINED ︎ ENGRAINED ︎ ENGRAINED ︎
︎Engrained has been showcased at the Venice Architecure Biennale in the Transpecies Design Exhibit
Engrained is a conceptual woven textile made from natural materials that utilize the traditional Bu Nong Indigenous Community weaving practices to portray the devastating story of deforestation in an effort to create awareness about this issue and to protect the region's biodiversity.
To craft the piece, I used a floor loom and cotton yarn that I naturally dyed using madder root for a nice red and Thai tea for an earthy orange color. I chose to use more vibrant colors that are not typically found in lush green forests so that it would catch illegal loggers' eyes and warn them to stay away from the tree similar to how vibrant animals' exterior indicates to predators that they are not to be messed with. Then I made beads from clay that would encase seeds and fertilizer to aid in giving the tree nutrients as the textile begins to naturally decompose over time. For the patterns of my textile, I pulled iconography from Bunong woven textiles as well as created my own.
From top to bottom the story the patterns aims to tell is: once there were lush and dense forests but due to human’s desire to extract nature as a resource for infrastructure development such as roads, it has harmed the tree population in turn creating wildlife habitat and biodiversity loss which endanger animals. In order to combat this issue, we need to sow the seeds in people’s minds that nature is not something humans can control rather we are engrained and interwoven into the natural world and must find a way to create a synergistic coexistence between species. And that starts by planting seeds rather than taking trees.
