About
The Flax Exchange is a community project advocating sustainable textile practice through growing, making and performance. It was inspired by the idea a textile fibershed, a term coined by Rebecca Burgess describing a network connecting growers with makers and consumers. The Flax Exchange aims to inspire people to grow their own materials for textile making and with this, reconnect with ancient crafts, materiality, landscape and the environment.
The project was initiated by artist Shane Waltener in partnership with The nOse, a project space and bookshop in North East Essex in 2022. The exchange then moved to Harwich for the Arts Festival in 2023, then the Isle of Dogs and Poplar in 2023/24 when funded by the Arts Council of England. There, working with community groups and local residents over the course of a year, sustainable textile processes and soil to soil systems were crafted into a series of live ‘making-actions’ highlighting the repetitive, rhythmical and musical nature of textile making that keep the maker rooted in the pattern of production.
This set of ‘making-actions’ became ‘Flax Suite’, a performance score exploring folk cultures and labour politics of traditional textile production performed by members of the exchange at Poplar Union in May 2024, alongside an exhibition of their work using flax grown on the Isle of Dogs. The score of ‘Flax Suite’ was then reworked and added to by pupils from Park Primary school in Newham and performed at the Whitechapel Gallery in December 2024. A performance of ‘Flax Suite’ is now planned for London Craft Week at the gallery.
Involved in the project are artists, makers, musicians and dancers including Aya Fukami, Diana Furlong, Divya Obson, Elisha Millard, Jen Cable, Merlin Nova, Laura Glaser, Nimita Patel, Otto Willberg, Ros Stoddart, Scherry Shi, Vega Hertel, Zoë Gilmour amongst others.
