Bioregional Resilience Through Bast Fibres

Zoe Gilbertson

Zoe Gilbertson is a fashion ecologist and textile systems designer. Combining experience of the mainstream fashion industry with regenerative agriculture, she explores how livelihoods focusing on collaboration, ecology and bioregionalism can support placed-based fibre and textile economies. Zoe believes that clothing has the potential to make connections to land and people past and present, once the stories and process bound up in the production of cloth come alive.

This poster summarises a recent Churchill Fellowship report that took Zoe on a journey exploring Europe by train and North America online. She looked for knowledge, small-scale machinery and cooperative methods that would support the growing, processing and production of bast fibres, such as flax and hemp, in the UK. The report provides guidance to those interested in bast fibres to start discussion around the land-use, scale, agronomy, machinery, governance, strategy and funding of flax and hemp ecosystems.

Bast fibres can support products beyond clothing such as food and building materials. Flax and hemp provide an excellent break crop in organic rotations, create monetary value, and connect people through culture. Starting from scratch in the UK, we have an opportunity to develop resilient, small-scale flexible systems that can cope with the variable nature of the weather and work with seasons, nature, climate and people and not profit extraction.

Alongside research in agriculture and machinery development, further practice-based research is required to support the cultural, creative and educational development of bast fibres. If more people experience the wonder and magic of processing straw into gold and develop awareness of the time and labour involved in linen production, there is likely to be wider support in communities for the farmers and systems needed to make flax and hemp products more widely available. People may pay the true costs of locally produced clothing if they feel connected to it and in-tune with their environment. Fashion can be so much more than a clothed body.

Website:

www.liflad.co.uk