Welcome back to the Cloth Cultures podcast series. For season 4, Amber Butchart speaks to some of the artists, curators and contributors who are exhibiting at the British Textile Biennial throughout October this year, 2025. Tune in to hear discussions on invention and innovation in textile production, from indigenous knowledge to space-age technology, from the earliest form of shelter, the tent, to space suits, and from natural dyes to the first polymers.
Season 4 Ep 1 – Amber Butchart is joined by artist Lucy Orta who has an expansive survey exhibition of her work with her partner Jorge at the Biennial this year, and writer and professor Jessica Hemmings. They discuss everything from texts to textiles, incarceration and craft, and how Lucy’s work highlights humanity’s impact on the planet, including themes such as displacement, climate change, and migration.
Season 4 Ep 2: Amber Butchart is joined by artists Sarah Rosalena and Crystal Bennes about their work which inspired by residencies at major scientific facilities: Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles County, California, and CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland, the home of the Large Hadron Collider. They discuss the erasure of women and people of colour from conventional scientific histories, as well as the power and precarity of archives, and links between computing and looms.
Season 4 Ep 3: Amber Butchart talks to artists Tania Candiani and Porfirio Gutiérrez about their work centred on cochineal. The cactus-dwelling cochineal insect can be used to produce a bright red pigment, a sacred indigenous colour which was exploited by colonial powers following the Spanish conquest of the area today known as Mexico. This colour transformed European art, but at a great cost. They discuss land, labour and ancestral knowledge through this lens, as well as the conceptual, colonial and economic context and value of art vs craft.
Season 4 Ep 4: Amber Butchart is in conversation with artist and academic Claire Wellesley-Smith, about their co-curated exhibition The Synthetic Revolution. The show looks at the development of the first polyester fibre made from crude oil by-products in Accrington, which was later branded with the name Terylene. They discuss how this local story became not only global but intergalactic in the post-war decades of the 1950s and 60s.
Season 4 Ep 5: Amber Butchart talks to artists Dhara Mehrotra and Ninon Ardisson who are both creating work for the British Textile Biennial this year. Tune in to hear them discuss everything from mycelium to slime mould and our potential to learn from these networks, as well as their radical potential for textile futures, biomimicry in design, and the false dichotomy between art and science.