Multispecies Patchwork

Multispecies Patchwork considers the possibilities of textile and more-than-human patchwork as a methodology to contemplate ways of caring for a damaged planet. A patch may be defined as a piece of cloth or other material used to mend or strengthen a torn or weak point. Equally, a patch may be used to treat someone's injuries or repair the damage to something in an improvised way. Patching and mending have long been considered strategies that extend, strengthen and repair existing material ecologies. In textile traditions this work has predominantly been the remit of women, where repeated dextrous gestures equate to time-intensive visible or invisible patches and patchworking. Re-casting the labours of patchworking, this project considers feminist approaches to making with cloth and multispecies others. The work of repair and transformation in a world dominated by new commodities and waste accumulation may also be thought of as a radical act of care.

Anthropologist Anna Tsing suggests that the effects of the climate crisis are not globally homogenous but rather heterogenous. Climate change affects people and more-than-humans differently in different locations. To use Tsing's term, its affects are "patchy". Multispecies Patchwork takes up Tsing’s line-of-thought by considering the situated relations that might occur with and in a multispecies patch. The patchwork engages a number of species of fungi that are known for their myco-remediation properties; their ability to repair damaged ecologies. Filamentous fungi work within patches or niches as they unmake and remake complex biochemical and material ecosystems through their metabolic processes.

The project was presented as a large multi-patchwork assemblage, bringing different
fragments together to visualise the complexity of multispecies relations when they come up against one another and textile waste matter. Textile fragments used in the work comprise offcuts and scraps accumulated over the years – linen sheets well slept in before becoming threadbare, the last remaining sentimental slithers of material from a child’s hand-made blanket, and textiles that themselves are damaged and in need of a patch. The fragments have been fixed together with an agar bioplastic recipe that also serves as a growing medium for the fungal species to explore and inhabit.