Ms Alia Parker

Alia Parker is a transdisciplinary designer and researcher. Her creative practice and scholarship is concerned with the intersection of contemporary design and science investigating the ethical, relational and material possibilities that arise when working with more-than-human organisms in design contexts. Alia’s critical bio-design practice employs experimental methodologies in textiles, fashion, biology, installation and moving image, underpinned by posthuman ethics, philosophies of care and biosemiotics. She often works with myco-remediating species of fungi and waste matter to explore themes and processes of repair, transformation, and digestion. Through her work she proposes paradigmatic shifts to how we co-design with biotic and abiotic systems in the context of Anthropogenic ecologies. She draws on design histories and speculative futures to generate affirmative ways of working in times of ecological precarity.

Alia has exhibited and presented her work widely, most recently in TEXTURE at Canberra Contemporary Art Space (2023); she won first prize in the wearable category for the Northern Beaches Environmental Art and Design Prize at Manly Art Gallery and Museum (2022); Biomateriality at the Delmar Gallery, Sydney (2022); Bankstown Biennale: Symbiosis at Bankstown Art Centre (2020); The Matter of Objects and Materiality at Lane Cove Gallery (2019); and has shown her work at significant national design institutions and events such as Sydney Design Festival, Melbourne Design Festival, the Museum of Applied Arts and Science, the Australian Design Centre and Sydney Craft Week. With Stephen Loo, Alia’s writing ‘Counterpointing Care: Performing with fungi in three (in)different acts’ has recently been published in Performance Research Journal (27, On Care). For over ten years, Alia worked as a designer, maker and researcher in the ethical fashion and textile industry in New York, Melbourne and Sydney.

MPhil Art, Design & Media (UNSW); Master of Fashion & Textiles - Entrepreneurship (RMIT); Bachelor of Design (UNSW)

Research interests include the intersection of design and science across practice, history and theory; bio-design; more-than-human design; posthuman ethics; affect; philosophies of care and biosemiotics. Transdisciplinary and collaborative design practices spanning contemporary textile, fashion, graphic, digital and biological approaches. Material interests in biomaterials and anthropogenic waste. Experimental, critical, future-oriented making practices that are speculative in nature or partner with industry. Interest in non-charismatic organisms such as fungi and bacteria and ecological processes that have metaphorical and applied effects in design, such as complexity, symbiosis, repair and decomposition.