Exploring sustainable textile design in Iceland

In March 2020, Claire Anderson, course leader for Graduate Diploma Textile Design, travelled to Iceland to work with product designer Hanna Dís Whitehead in collaboration with The Cultural Center of Hornafjörður.

Funded by the Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Research Staff Fund, Claire’s trip focused on researching local resources and their making potential for public engagement, using contributions from Icelandic companies of pre-consumer waste materials as well as natural elements from sourced from the surrounding area.

Though some aspects of the project, such as workshops for young people and a public exhibition, have had to be postponed due to the pandemic, this trip allowed Claire and Hanna to develop an initial body of work that took inspiration from material traditions within the area of Hornafjörður.

We spoke to Claire about the project, her own practice and her long-term collaboration with designer Hanna.

Can you please tell us more about the work you were doing in Iceland last year? What was that project and how would you describe your practice?

"I see on your web page a nice photo with futuristic things, I like the future!"
[Hanna Dís Whitehead in reply to Claire Anderson, January 2014].

In 2014 I began working on an international collaboration with the Icelandic product and space designer Hanna Dís Whitehead. Through the exchange and sharing of knowledge and ideas toward purposeful combinations of traditional textile heritages with the contemporary and with the future, our collaboration is rooted in a desire for improved sustainability.

The Hornafjörður (Hofn) region has been the most isolated area of Iceland due to glacial rivers and impassable glacial tongues. Disruptively, however, our collective carbon footprint now allows for greater accessibility. By taking inspiration from material and craft traditions within the area of Hornafjörður, we had aimed to highlight the unseen potential within its natural ecologies.

You have worked with Hanna Dis Whitehead several times over the past few years. Can you please tell me more about that relationship and how it came about?

At the end of 2013 I was living in Glasgow during the lead up to the Scottish Independence Referendum where there were a lot of people feeling increasingly disenfranchised with the Westminster government and were looking to the Nordic countries and Iceland as alternative models.

I had an idea for a while to develop a project looking at shared craft traditions and heritages between Scotland and Iceland - the landscapes looked so similar from photos and films. I knew Hanna’s work from magazines and design blogs and I loved her graduating project from the Design Academy Eindhoven – it was very inspiring – so I asked her if she would be interested in working with me via email. The project idea was vague at the time and I had no idea if she would even reply but she did and we have been working together on and off since then.

Our initial project was inspired by broader socio-political discussions centred around the Scottish independence debate. The project explores the potential to create a common material identity drawing on the Nordic/Scottish regions’ shared cultural, historical and geographical roots.

Together we forecast the identity of a futuristic Nordic-Scottish tribe, inspired by its Viking heritage. The Nordic–Scottish tribe emphasises the designers shared influences, as well as DIY conceptual strategies that favour the spirit of immediacy, craftsmanship and sustainability. The project provokes audiences to reflect on their identities, suggesting visions of cultural fusion and evolution.

The offcuts were made up of a combination of handknitting yarn from Icelandic wool: Plötulopi, Álafosslopi, Bulkylopi, LéttlopI and Einband. Icelandic sheep are unique, and as such, so is their yarn. The breed has evolved in isolation as a result of being separated from other breeds for centuries. In addition, exposure to the sub-Arctic climate has produced wool with two distinctive fibers: the first, soft, insulating fibers found close to the body, called ‘þel’ and the second long, water-repellent fibers found on the surface called ‘tog’.

We responded directly to the materials, and deliberately eschewed the intended application of knit, through manipulation, deconstruction, knotting and stitch. We acknowledge the strong traditions of wool in Nordic and Scottish textile practice and have let the nature of the materials determine their application, while the project overall is informed strongly by our own processed and ad hoc strategies and improvisation.

The implications of this ad hoc approach to the portrayal of our cultural, historical and geographical roots is intentionally subversive. For instance, an abstract re-appropriation of materials outside traditional craft frameworks raises questions around sustainability. How can we optimise underused and undervalued resources?