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Crafts CouncilStories

8 makers using biodesign to grow their work


ByLaura Snoad

7 July 2020

Meet the pioneers of the field, creating everything from dresses woven from plant roots to mushroom embroidery


Laura Snoad

7 July 2020

  • Craft innovation
  • Textiles
  • Sustainable craft
  • Crafts magazine

Interwoven #14, 2016-17, one of Diana Scherer’s ‘exercises in root system domestication’

A growing mass of craftspeople, designers, scientists, engineers and investors are proposing biodesign as a solution to many of the problems of unsustainable industries, from fashion to furniture design.

At its simplest, biodesign is the practice of incorporating natural processes into building or making, often by fermenting, cultivating or genetically engineering organisms such as bacteria, algae, yeast, fungi and proteins to grow materials and objects – think furniture made from fungi, yarns made from processed kelp, and genetically engineered spider silk.

It may sound like sci-fi, but biodesign is something humans have been doing for millennia, to leaven bread, make alcohol and pasteurise milk. But now, advances in genome editing allow us to manipulate DNA with precision – and biodesign has become a $13.4bn industry. Here are some of the pioneering makers working in the field today.


Biological Atelier, Amy Congdon

Amy Congdon
New York-based Congdon has been using her embroidery skills to create scaffolds to support cell growth. Not only could her technique be used to grow sustainable materials for fashion, but Congdon believes it has potential in the field of tissue-engineering, for growing skin and eventually whole organs. ‘Textiles as a discipline offers a way to create bespoke structures that are difficult or impossible to achieve in other mediums,’ she says.


Lace Assembly Doily 1, Mycelium Textiles, Carole Collet, 2019

Suzanne Lee
One of the pioneers of biofabrication, Suzanne Lee is the founder of Biofabricate, 'a platform for biomaterial innovators and consumer brands growing a sustainable future' and author of the 2005 book Fashioning The Future: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe. Her groundbreaking Biocouture project was a fashion collection created from kombucha bacteria.


Project Coelicolor: Terroir, Natsai Audrey Chieza, 2019

Carole Collet
Collet is founder of Central Saint Martins’ Materials Futures and Biodesign master’s courses. In her own work, she uses mycelium, a network of thread-like fungi roots, to mimic traditional techniques that would normally be oil-based and non-biodegradable. She has used this to develop natural tie-dye (called ‘tie-grow’), slow-grown embroidery and lace, mycelium-based puff binder and Bondaweb, a form of pleating that stays in place even when washed.


  • Project Coelicolor: Terroir, Natsai Audrey Chieza, 2019

Natsai Audrey Chieza
Among the projects developed by Natsai Audrey Chieza’s studio Faber Futures is a biodesigned dyeing technique called Project Coelicolor. A soil-dwelling organism is grown directly onto fabric and its naturally secreted pigment creates a watercolour-like purple hue that’s chemical-free, colourfast and uses dramatically less water than industrial dyeing.


Shoe with upper grown by bacteria, Jen Keane

Jen Keane
Keane wants to prove that natural materials can also be technical, transparent and lightweight, rather than ‘tea-coloured and granola-looking’. She has developed a trainer using the K. rhaeticus bacteria, which forms a mesh-like structure on a nano scale. Her ‘weaving’ process involves creating a scaffold of threads (something she likens to the warp) in 3D, overlacing it almost like a spider’s web.


  • Rootbound #2, 2017, dress for the exhibition Fashioned from Nature at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2018, Diana Scherer

Diana Scherer
Amsterdam-based artist Diana Scherer creates intricate 3D textiles by manipulating the root growth of plants. Her work explores the relationship between man and the natural environment and the boundaries between plant culture and nature.


Mycelium + Timber, Sebastian Cox and Ninela Ivanova

Sebastian Cox and Ninela Ivanova
Furniture designer Cox and researcher Ivanova teamed up to produce a collection of furniture out of mycelium and scrap willow wood. The Mycelium + Timber collection include simple stools and lights.


  • Grow Your Own Couture, 2018 by Piero D’Angelo

Piero D’Angelo
The London-based designer Piero D’Angelo’s slippery Wetware Couture garments are made from the neuron-like networks of slime mould. His work strives to redefine Couture, where users can grow their own outfit and wear living organisms.

This is an edited extract of an article in the September/October 2019 issue of Crafts magazine


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