Wool for the Future Award
2021
Jessica Harrington
Jessica’s project is designed to reduce waste associated with home textiles and furnishings by designing them with end-of-life processes in mind.
2019
Apurva Srihari
Apurva was selected as the first recipient of the new Worshipful Company of Woolmen’s Award ‘Wool for the Future‘, demonstrating the most innovation with her use of wool being absolutely central to her final piece.
Her MA project consists of using wool as one of the primary fibres. She is researching how fabrics made from wool with embedded seeds can be a medium of interaction with consumers and their textiles by growing herbs and vegetables at the end of its life, increasing the value of the fabric that they own. Wool is being incorporated as it possesses some extraordinary qualities other than just being biodegradable (such as antibacterial, self-cleaning, fire retardant and a major source of nitrogen). The fabric made from wool and plant seeds can also have varied applications such as an air purifier inside homes, a living wall-hanging or plantable cloth gift wrapper (inspired by Japanese Furoshiki cloth).
Click here to read Apurva’s paper which reflects on her last year studying an MA in Textile Design at the Chelsea College of Arts and her personal research project The Eternal Value of Ephemeral Cloth