FABRICATEUR – BETWEEN FIBRE, TEXTILES, DESIGN & MAKING

Lesley Millar is Emeritus Professor University for the Creative Arts at the University of the Arts, Farnham. Millar curated the influential Transition & Influence exhibitions including Textural Space (2001) Through the Surface (2003), Cloth & Memory (2013), and more recently, Fabric: Touch and Identity (2020), and Soft Power (2025) many of which pioneered cross-cultural explorations of fabric-based design, developing long lasting partnerships with Japanese textile designers, and museums and the country’s broader fabrics and textile design community.

Linda Brassington – is engaged with the experiential nature of textiles embodied relationship to space and place, as well as the importance of intangible cultural heritage for contemporary practice. Brassington is author of Indigo and Resist Dyeing: Performance, Metaphor and Materiality in Contemporary Cloth 

^{Machiko Agano and Anniken Amundsen’s collaborative fibrework in Through the Surface – photo c/o Lesley Millar/Transition & Influence}

LR Vandy is an artist and maker, who began working with rope materials in the aftermath of discovering the Chatham Historic Dockyards Ropery in 2022, the last working ropery in Britain. Vandy’s current exhibition, Rise, at the Weston Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, explores the sculptural forms and textural qualities of rope materials, linking its naval and seafaring uses to the industrial revolution, slavery, emancipation and to pre-modern seasonal celebrations, like the Mayday maypole.

^{LR Vandy, Rise, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2026. In collaboration with October Gallery. Photo © India Hobson, courtesy YSP.} 

Elke Burmeister runs Öcouture and is the European partner for the Dipdii Textiles project in Rudrapur, Northern Bangladesh. Rudrapur has become known across the architectural world for its buildings realised by humanitarian architect Anna Heringer, the most recent of which is Anandaloy, which is the new home for the Dipdii Textile co-operative.

Diana Wildschut is a co-founder of De WAR, the first grassroots Fablab, in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, which has developed many open-source forms of digital tech to help advance citizen science and social innovation. Diana will talk about the fusion of open-source tech and natural materials and lead a workshop, applying this approach to making one-off dedicated clothing.

Deborah Barker is founder of the Southeast England Fibreshed and a natural dyer, connecting local natural wool, farming communities and fibre makers across the Southeast. Southeast England Fibreshed is part of the flourishing international Fibershed network, linking place sensitive regenerative farming with designers and makers working with natural fibres, and, in the context of the Southeast England Fibreshed, particularly sheep wool, hemp and plant dyes.

^{Dipdii Textiles makers in Anandaloy, the most recent of Anna Heringer’s buildings in Rudrapur, Northern Bangladesh – photo Kurt Hoerbst}

Lesley Millar, Emeritus Professor at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, is a textile designer and was director of the International Textile Research Centre until 2024. Beginning in the early 2000’s through to the mid-2020’s Millar curated the influential Transition & Influence series of exhibitions including Textural Space (2001), Through the Surface (2003) 21:21 the textile vision of Reiko Sudo and NUNO (2005-2007), Lost in Lace (2011) Cloth & Memory (2013) and more recently, Fabric: Touch and Identity (2020), Tansa (2022) and Soft Power (2025). Many of these exhibitions pioneered cross-cultural explorations of fabric-based design, developing a long-lasting partnership with Japanese textile designers, museums and the country’s broader fabrics and textile design community. The exhibition projects were also noted for highlighting experimental materials, textile history and memory, and the interplay between sensuality, the erotic and fabric materials.

Millar writes regularly about textile practice including co-editing, with Alice Kettle, the books The Erotic Cloth (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and Reading The Thread: cloth and communication (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025).

In 2008 she was given the Japan Society Award for her contribution to Anglo-Japanese relations, followed by an MBE in 2011 for her contribution to Higher Education. In 2021 she was created Honorary Fellow of West Dean College of Arts, Design, Crafts and Conservation. She is currently a Trustee of the Crafts Study Centre at the University for the Creative Arts and Trustee of The Textile Society.

Her presentation Transition and Influence will discuss ideas around the development and recognition of textile as a medium of choice today.

^{From 21:21 – Reiko Sudo exhibition. photo Roger Bamber}

Fourth Door Review has featured several pieces on the Transition & Influence exhibitions, and Millar has contributed both features and reviews to FDR.

Linda Brassington is engaged with the experiential nature of textiles embodied relationship to space and place, as well as the importance of intangible cultural heritage for contemporary practice. Brassington is author of Indigo and Resist Dyeing: Performance, Metaphor and Materiality in Contemporary Cloth.

^{Mashiko by Linda Brassington}

FURTHER

String, Felt, Thread by Eliza Auther – reviewed by Lesley Millar in Fourth Door Review 9

The Fine Art of Japanese Fibre work by Tochimichi Kuwayama in Fourth Door Review 9

The Other Side of Surface: the Through the Surface exhibition by Lesley Millar in Fourth Door Review 7

Sculpting Invisible Space: Machiko Agano by Oliver Lowenstein in Fourth Door Review 7

Through the Process: Anniken Amundsen by Oliver Lowenstein in Fourth Door Review 7

The Space of Textures by Lesley Millar in Fourth Door Review 5

^{Lost in Lace exhibition artist Annie Bascoul – photo Transition & Influence}

^{LR Vandy, Rise, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2026. In collaboration with October Gallery. Photo © India Hobson, courtesy YSP.} 

LR Vandy is an artist and maker, who began working with rope materials in the aftermath of discovering the Chatham Ropery in 2022, the last working Ropery in Britain. Vandy’s current exhibition, Rise, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, explores the sculptural forms and textural qualities of rope materials, linking its naval and seafaring uses to the industrial revolution, slavery, emancipation and also to pre-modern seasonal celebrations, like the Mayday maypole dancing. Rise features Vandy’s large-scale installation, Dancing in Time: The Ties That Bind Us, a five-metre-high rope sculpture originally commissioned for the Liverpool Docks International Slavery Museum’s Martin Luther King celebrations in 2023.

Prior to her immersion in rope and its physical and material qualities, Vandy’s earlier work includes her Hull series, exhibited at the October Gallery in 2019. Vandy’s Fabricateur talk continues our Artist, Maker, Craftsperson? All of the Above theme begun last year with our Alison Crowther and Walter Bailey evening.

Vandy is featured in its special themed feature on El Anatsui, October Gallery, and its Global African artists in the recent Fourth Door Review no 12.

FURTHER

A to Z and back again (from El Anatsui to Zena Masombuka) – October’s Global African artists by Chris Spring in Fourth Door Review 12

^{Dancing in Time: The Ties That Bind Us installation Liverpool Docks – National Museums Liverpool}

^{Dipdii Textiles makers in Anandaloy, the most recent of Anna Heringer’s buildings in Rudrapur, Northern Bangladesh – photo Kurt Hoerbst}

Elke Burmeister, Diana Wildschut and Deborah Barker

Elke Burmeister runs Öcouture, a small eco-textile design company in Salzburg, Austria. Elke is also the current European partner for the Dipdii Textiles, part of the Dipshika project in Rudrapur, a small village in Northern Bangladesh.

Rudrapur has become known across the architectural world for a series of buildings realised by humanitarian architect Anna Heringer the most recent of which is a home to Rudrapur’s textiles community. Anandaloy, the latest of Heringer’s Rudrapur series – described by Dezeen as the ‘most significant building of 2020’ – houses both the Dipdii Textiles project and a disabilities centre.

A live zoom link to Rudrapur and the textiles building is planned, with Elke acting as go-between to both the Dipdii textiles centre and a virtual tour of the building.

^{Elke Burmeister}

Elke’s Lewes visit follows on from Martin Rauch, and his son, Sebastian’s in the last two years. Through Heringer’s buildings, particularly her first building, the HomeMade METI school, Rudrapur has become well-known and inspirational project across the forward looking architectural world, This will be the first live link up with Rudrapur and one of the few times where the focus has been on the Dipdii textiles dimension.  

Anna Heringer and her Rudrapur work was featured as part of the Ground Up Architecture themed feature on Humanitarian architecture in Fourth Door Review 9.

^{Dipdii Textiles exhibition – photo Die Arge Lola}

FURTHER

On Sustaining Beauty by Anna Heringer in Fourth Door Review 9

Anna Heringer’s Journey to the East by Oliver Lowenstein in Fourth Door Review 9

Spirit of the METI-Handmade School by Rabeya Rahman in Unstructured 6

^{Anandaloy – home of Dipdii Textiles – photo Kurt Hoerbst}

^{Before the clear-up: De War Fablab’s textile’s studio – photo Oliver Lowenstein}

Diana Wildschut is a co-founder of De WAR, the first grassroots Fablab in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. Diana will be talking about how open-source digital tech can create individually dedicated clothing and textile fabrications. She will detail and show earlier workshops and clothing and other fabrications that she and colleagues have created at De WAR.

Diana will also run a De WAR Fablab inspired workshop, making and illustrating how one-off dedicated clothing can be created through the fusion of open-source digital tech and natural materials.

Wildschut and partner and De WAR co-founder, Harmen Zijp, are long term Fourth Door collaborators. Last year Zijp was part of our Intersections sustainable transport micro-seminar, and in 2023 Wildschut and Zijp led a workshop, PARTICULATE, building open-source sensors to track and trace air quality pollution levels across the town, before co-creating a publicly accessible online map of Lewes’s air quality, to be used as a citizen led co-created monitoring tool.

FURTHER

Born stubborn – sticking with open technology and social innovation by Harmen Zijp and Diana Wildschut in Fourth Door Review 12

^{Diana and Harmen during the PARTICULATE workshop, Lewes 2023 – photo Zuky Serper}

^{Bioregional wool top @2025’s Future Fashion Landscapes – photo Mila Burcikova}

Deborah Barker & South England East Fibershed – Deborah Barker is founder of the Southeast England Fibreshed and a natural dyer, connecting local natural wool and fibre makers across Sussex and the South East. She was a founder of the Brighton contemporary art space, Fabricate.

Southeast England Fibreshed is part of the flourishing international Fibershed network, linking regenerative farming with designers and makers working with natural fibres, and in the South East context particularly sheep wool, hemp and plant dyes. In 2024 Southeast and Southwest England Fibreshed co-published Farming Fashion: Wool, an introductory guide to partnerships between bioregional farmers and designers to restore wool supply networks across the southern Britain.

Deborah will be talking about the work of the Fibreshed and running a workshop during the course of the day.

^{Regenerative sheep and regenerative shepherdess – photo Deborah Barker}