Lesley Roberts
Our making makes our minds, and our making ensures our thriving. Textiles are a poetry of survival. This presentation explores the capacity for resiliency in urban and rural ecosystems through the lens of regenerative, place-based, textile systems.
Our local economies, our households, bring forth the materials and relationships we need to build hopeful, resilient futures. Within local bioregions, fibre looms as a particularly rich lens into a creative and tactical imagining of possible futures. Fibre and textiles are a bridge connecting history, economics, and labour to an enduring narrative capacity and a legacy of material and technical innovations.
Not only is it necessary to re-engage with textiles in their material form, in order to connect to our lived, physical world, the world we live in as embodied beings—but we also have an opportunity to reveal textiles as a hidden and critical part of the broader historical narrative we inhabit, the infrastructure patterns we’ve created, and the economic philosophies of the post-Industrial Revolution world. They sit at the intersections of urban and rural social, cultural, and economic systems, and as such are a physical manifestation of patterns and systems that entangle us all.
In the face of rising uncertainties in international geopolitics, catastrophic climate change, and growing social unrest, we must actively re-engage with the land, our communities, and the essential skills that make civilisation, survival, and thriving possible. These opportunities sit in the spaces between rural and urban ecosystems and ways of being. We must re-embrace our ability to know with our hands, to make what we need, to trust ourselves and each other to know—and make—the world in which we live.
Lesley Roberts
Material Encounters | University of Arts London
I am a systems thinker, creative strategist, cultural producer, and community builder. Threading together a degree in art history, a professional life in luxury marketing (storytelling), and a fascination with place, I have developed a social practice that fosters creativity and its innate connection to the natural world, that brings together textile craft, grassroots organizing, alternative economic systems, and a cross-disciplinary approach to art, cultural discourse, and regenerative design. My body of work encompasses material ecology; material and the mind; local ecosystems and economies, and the building of an alternative, collaborative, hopeful future.
My interest is in regenerative design as a practical discipline, as the “poetry of survival,” and as it can be explored through exhibition, storytelling, and community building, as well as application. To this end, I produce symposia on textile art, craft, and local production; initiate and produce talks and studio tours with artists, authors, architects, activists, and academics; and co-create workshops that explore hand-mind-body relationships. I am the lead for the Southern California chapter of Fibershed, the soil-to-soil regenerative textile movement, and the founder of Material Encounters, a space for my personal research-thinking about our social, ecological, and material worlds. I co-created a working group that is exploring alternative economic models for regional fibre systems. I have been asked to speak at industry and university events on material innovation, regenerative textile systems, and the creative economy. I recently curated and produced Sympoiesis: making with, exploring how clothing has shaped our relationship to the land, our bodies, and each other. I produced a screening of Biocentrics, the yet-to-be-released documentary of Janine Benyus’ game-changing methodology. I recently presented at Textile Society of America’s 2024 Symposium, Shifts and Strands.
I have a BA in Art History from UCLA and a certificate from UCLA Anderson’s Executive Education program. I am currently enrolled in the MA Regenerative Design program at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
