Can you start by giving us an overview of your practice and what led you to explore the intersection of ecology, architectural design, and care?

For me, care is about attuning oneself to the Other, to extend sympathy and compassion. Care is embedded in environmental thought through the ideas of stewardship and personifying what is natural through the idea of “Mother Nature”. With my practice, I feel indebted to this tradition while also seeking to apply the idea of care to the materials that I’m making my work with. I think that the concept of care is about extending an understanding solidarity towards that which you’re engaging with. 

I think that this idea of care helps me to navigate the tension between ecology and architecture. In very different ways, both ecology and architecture are about relationships to broader networks. Ecology is the study of relationships between things and their symbiosis, whereas modern architecture is much more of a systems theory, concerning the connections between the built environment and the broader infrastructure around it. I think the blending of architecture, ecology and care becomes interesting because it generates questions of how we extend our compassion towards things beyond ourselves, and how does the previously hegemonic way of seeing the world, that of the architectural-engineering perspective which was so common in the 20th century, can be enriched by the emergent philosophy and poetics of ecology. 

Your practice intertwines ecological thought with architectural design to offer “critical reflections on existing institutional practices." How do you incorporate alternative ways of being into your work?

A core hypothesis of my work is that the climate crisis is a crisis of imagination. We need to imagine alternative ways of being in order to begin any critical reevaluation of how we design, construct, and interact with the world. With a background in architecture, I initially found it hard to accept this hypothesis, as the practice and its pedagogy are firmly rooted in extractivist, modernist thought, and in set ways of working, and in static views of the world. During my postgraduate studies, I explored how these biases might be challenged. I was particularly inspired by my tutor Godofredo Enes Pereira’s essay, “Towards an Environmental Architecture,” which sets out the need to imagine different ways of being and conducting creative practice in an age of climate breakdown.

Working with textiles is a practical embodiment of this reimagination. There’s a quote I think about a lot, from Robin Evans, that architects do not make buildings; they make drawings of buildings. Creative work is often abstracted from the end result - a cloud-based database can produce an oil spill, or a masterplan on a desktop can carve up an entire nation. I see my working with textiles as going against this. Working with textiles involves direct engagement with the end material. There is no level of abstraction between the creative idea and the implementation of it. It, therefore, also necessitates a higher level of care. You can't be mistaken about what you're working with, or about what your ideas are being implemented through. When designing vast landscapes or huge buildings through computer software, you can be abstracted from the reality of harsh, dangerous materials being used and their environmental impact. With textiles, you are directly working, being and living alongside these materials.

While I would today call myself a textile artist, I’m not sure whether this is an evergreen statement. I have jumped headfirst into the medium for its capacity to engage with environmental ideas and its communicative values. But this is not to say that I wouldn’t be interested in exploring other mediums. I think that perhaps what is quite fundamental in my practice is this intersection and tension between craft and technical practice or institutionalized practice. A lot of people make dichotomies between craft and industrialization or handmade versus machine-made, but I see the starkest divide as being between multi-generational lineages of embodied knowledge versus disruptive “revolutionary” knowledge. Craft is based on one generation teaching the next, creating long, continuous chain of traditions. Technoscience follows Thomas Kuhn's model of scientific revolutions, where a new understanding will come along and will utterly usurp the previous knowledge practice. This therefore creates industrial methodologies based on a series of ruptures, as opposed to the continuum of craft. I think that as we experience the climate crisis, the greatest rupture humans have ever faced, we need to re-engage these threads of lineage, be it indigenous ways of understanding the world, or traditional craft, both of which are referential to a pre-industrialized age, and therefore an age before human activity was contributing so disruptively to climate breakdown.

Your use of textiles as a medium entangled with economics and geology is intriguing. How do you mobilize textiles to reframe our relationship with ecology, and what significance do you find in this medium for conveying your message?

I’ve long been interested in Timothy Morton’s thinking on ecology, particularly the idea that being ecological is about acknowledging that we are always-already enmeshed within a network of relationships. He also has this concept of stickiness, that the connections between things are viscous and bind to one another. I got interested in textiles from my familial background and my mother’s work as a curtain maker, and as I was studying Environmental Architecture I started to see these fabrics in a different light. My work often draws from visuals and aesthetics that pertain to politics, technoscience and geology, and I began to understand that the material substrate I’m creating my work from - textiles -  are themselves inherently economical, and are “sticky” to their geologic origins. Modern textiles are industrial products, derived from petrochemicals as synthetic fibres and spun by underpaid and overexploited workers in the global south. In this way then, I realised that with my work the medium becomes the message, or perhaps it's better to say that the textile medium is the “proof” of hypothesise I put forward in my work. 

Can you elaborate on the submitted work, The New Imperial Table Quiltwork?

This work was made during my residency at Hangar CIA, Lisbon. At this time, I had been working on a series of quiltworks under the series name “The Art Of Surveying”. This series grew from my fascination with a 17th-century text, “The Art Of Surveying” by Vincent Wing. The Wing family is largely forgotten today, but their surveying work fundamentally transformed how we see land and property relations. The Art of Surveying is mostly a practical text on how to measure fields, which seems innocuous from our perspective but at the time was revolutionary, as most people in Europe had customary rights to land through feudal arrangements. The Wing family’s surveying methods allowed the landscape to move from being a source of sustenance to becoming a patchwork of abstracted property deeds, bounded shapes divided up as exclusive domains of private landowners - a move which Ellen Meiksins Wood argues is the birth of capitalism. The New Imperial Table was the fulcrum through which this capitalist process really got underway. Nestled in the middle of this dry text, The New Imperial Table was a conversion table, allowing the unification of folk/traditional measuring methods and the imperial measurement of the imperial mile. This idea of unifying local measurements versus imperial measurements really is the foundation for cadastral mapping as we understand it today. When I came across the original archival imagery of this imperial table, I was struck by the beauty of the drawing itself but also marvelled at my own ignorance towards its history. This relatively innocuous diagram has had agency in the world far beyond its unassuming size. In transcribing the visual element of this work onto a textile surface, I wanted to queer its appearance, hoping to bring the audience into a similar space of questioning and disorientation towards our contemporary understanding of how space is organised.

Could you share more about how your practice is rooted in ecology and how this ethos influences your creative process and the messages you aim to convey?

My practice is tethered to ecology in both subject and spirit. In subject, I explore different ideas which pertain to ecological subject matter such as a recent series, Studies in Tortuosity, which explored the ways in which soil structures affect water attenuation through the navigation of liquids below ground. But also I see my work as ecological in spirit, by which I mean that, as an artist, I am working from an ecological perspective. I see myself and my practice as always-already embedded within a mesh of actors, be they human or non-human, that are influencing my work, that are contributing to my ideas and that I myself am then feeding back into. I found that, when I first started using the word artist to describe myself, I felt quite discombobulated. I think the term comes with a lot of baggage in the modern day. It connotes this myth of the individual, a solo artist who stands aloof or abstract from the world at large. This is fundamentally in tension with how I conduct myself, and how I consider my relationship to the world at large. In my work’s fusion of its subject matter and my practice’s approach, I hope to demonstrate a different way of doing creative practice.

Your master’s thesis, 'Sedimentary Desiderata,' critiqued the apparatus of anthropocenic design. How do you envision engaging with the world in a non-extractivist, geologically engaged manner?

My thesis investigated the archival record of colonial water practices within the Punjab (what is today India and Pakistan). I got interested in the subject as a student who was steeped in the traditional experience of architecture and, again, this idea that designers make drawings of things, not the things themselves. The project engaged heavily with the archival information of the Raj Engineers, documents which are controversially held in London at a severe distance from the area that is still affected by these drawings. I wanted to try and understand how, just as the geology of a region accrues over time with different sedimentary layers, ideas and scientific methods also accrue in a geological manner. As I spoke before about Thomas Kuhn's scientific revolutions, the optimistic or purest model of the scientific method is one of constantly revising our ideas to create the best possible model of the world, devoid of any partisan ideology, and devoid of bias. But my research was instead very interested in how a lot of baggage gets carried on through in scientific rationality.

Regarding non-extractivist design, this approach was about challenging the existing colonial infrastructure legacy. The irrigation designs of the Punjab were a fundamentally extractivist project, designed by the British to increase taxation revenue instead of ensuring agricultural success. A mounting question in regards to the future viability of the contemporary Punjab region is how to redress this colonial inheritance. The region’s soil health is being degraded, aquifer water levels are being depleted all due to this irrigation model, a model which was never meant to create long-term sustainability but instead to create stable tax revenues for the British. 

I'm set to give a talk on this subject soon in London where I will be exploring how engaging with the archival material regarding the designs of these irrigation systems may be useful as a means of identifying culpability and responsibility for reparations or loss and damage fund-style payments to this region. 

How do you aim to reshape the way people understand their entangled pasts within global capitalism?

I find this question very interesting because I think that we stand at a moment where history is being actively revised to better represent the multiplicity of voices that have shaped the modern world. I am all for this, but this impetus is being contested by people whose worldview is out of step with the modern day. A lot of people seem to be angry at efforts to challenge the climate crisis and its antecedent capitalist structure rather than getting angry at the system itself. I think again this comes from a crisis of imagination, and with it a dearth of care and solidarity. In my work, I try to emphasise that global capitalism and the extractivist methods that underpin it have roots in centuries-old ideas of land enclosure and privatisation, as shown in the New Imperial Quiltwork piece. People who often are pushing against so-called “wokery” or progressive ideas about history largely because they have been taught a very narrow, class-blind history of how we got to where we are today. It's bizarre to me that people who are descendants of the peasants working class within Europe side with a history that erases the exploitation of labour, indentured and enslaved, and glorifies those doing the exploitation.

I think that finding new ways of telling these stories is essential. What is needed are new stories and new ways of framing how we got here. There's been some really interesting work on this recently within an English context, where figures on the left are seeking to find ways to reclaim patriotism, seeking to try and find ways to create a new progressive national identity that isn’t rooted in racist, Islamophobic hatred. And this comes back to the perspective on the environment. Caroline Lucas, the UK’s first Green Party member of parliament, has recently published a book, Another England, which explores how romantic attitudes to the landscape could be a key method of reclaiming a progressive identity. I think that such efforts are essential to contextualise our entangled pasts.

How do you believe art can serve as a catalyst for raising environmental awareness and inspiring positive change, and what challenges do you encounter in conveying these messages through your art?

I think art has a vital role in the creation of imaginaries and in the framing of understandings. Artwork has a capacity to draw people in and into worlds which they would not otherwise be inhabitant of.  The role of environmental art doesn’t have to be explicitly talking about discreet issues - say so the amount of carbon emitted from X activity or the risk that Y action has towards a quantifiable level of pollution. In many ways, the specifics can be alienating, and distract from the bigger point. Instead, I think the role of environmental art is about attuning audiences and attuning the world at large, towards worldviews based on ecological relationships of care rather than extractivist relationships of exchange. 

Do you believe that engaging in artistic expression is a mode of nurturing? If so, what are the reasons behind this perspective?

I would say so yes and I think maybe another word I would use here would be cultivating. I think that artistic expression is a hitherto undervalued practice, a practice of insight and research and mode of inquiry that is essential to environmentalism. I think there’s been a privileging of the scientific method as a route to addressing environmental issues, which is of course needed, but  I think artistic expression is key in nurturing our relationship with the environment. Artistic practice is an ongoing action and in that way, I see it as nurturing and akin to cultivating. It’s something that is ongoing, which develops over time and grows overtime. 

What message or call to action would you like to leave our readers with?

To try and imagine the world otherwise. I think that we’re living in a moment where our conception of the world is incredibly tired, and is failing us. I’m hoping that through environmental art, through ecologies of care, there can be new space to imagine novel ways of relating to one another and fresh ways of relating to nature.

Find more about the artist here.

Cover image:

Study in Tortuosity by Christie Swallow. Image courtesy of Christie Swallow.