BIOTEXTILES & LABORATORY CRAFT

BIOENGINEERED TEXTILES AND MICROBIAL CULTURED MATERIALS

This section focuses on the development of biomaterials through textile methodologies and microbial processes. Projects including Biomateria: Biotextile Craft; Crafting Biotextiles; Salivam; Wastelands; The Bactinctorium; Bucci; and Plump and Pliant explore how living matter can be cultivated, structured, and transformed into textile, sculptural, and infrastructural forms.

Drawing on techniques such as my award-winning invention, wet weaving cellular biomaterial fabrication, as well as microbial cultivation, fermentation, staining, and enzyme extraction, these works position textiles as proto-biotechnologies—systems of structure, tension, porosity, and repair that parallel the self-organization (autopoeisis) of living tissues. Here, materials are responsive and shaped through ongoing negotiation with cellular, microbial and environmental forces.

The laboratory functions as a site of material co-creation, where craft-based approaches intersect with biological processes to produce hybrid forms. These works challenge industrial paradigms of efficiency and control by instead slowing down to highlight growth, maintenance, and failure as generative conditions, advancing a practice grounded in haptic knowledge, material agency, and ecological interdependence.

SALIVAM

2018

Salivam emerged from a 10-month collaborative research investigation with Dr. Denis Groleau, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Microorganisms and Industrial Processes at Université de Sherbrooke, through the Art-Science Interface Residency program facilitated by Sporobole centre en art actuel. The project combined laboratory experimentation with art-based DIYbio approaches, employing bacterial culture, enzyme extraction, and collagen degradation to explore themes of intimacy, material transformation, and biotechnology. Central to the project is the concept of “bacto-intimacy”—the micro-proximity of bacterial cells to their substrates during metabolic processes—alongside a critical and humorous engagement with industrial biotech and the cultural hype surrounding anti-aging technologies.

SCOBY WORKS: MICROBIAL CELLULOSE AS MATERIAL PRACTICE

2017-2018

Across projects including Bucci, Mother, and Plump and Pliant, WhiteFeather developed a sustained investigation into SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast) as a living biomaterial, leading directly to her innovative contributions on the project Wastelands by Tagny Duff. Cultivated through fermentation, bacterial cellulose is transformed into textile, structural, and sculptural forms, positioning microbial activity as both medium and co-creative agent. These works engage themes of lineage, care, and interdependence, drawing on the SCOBY “mother” as a model of generative reproduction and material transmission. At the same time, they challenge dominant paradigms of control and efficiency in biotechnology and design, highlighting growth, maintenance, and failure as generative conditions.

Bucci is a speculative, post-human garment that reimagines a luxury knock-off through a synthesis of microbial and machinic processes. Developed collaboratively with co-designer Théo Chauvirey, the project brings together living systems and digital fabrication to produce a hybrid textile form.

Mother, developed with doula Yvonne Pelling, is a sculptural biofabrication work that uses cultivated SCOBY to evoke the interior of the maternal body, framing microbial cellulose as a generative system of lineage, care, and embodied transformation.

Plump and Pliant, developed in collaboration with conservator Courtney Books, situates SCOBY-derived bacterial cellulose within conservation discourse, examining its material instability and preservation as both a technical challenge and a conceptual extension of living matter in art.

Menstrual blood agar with Vogesella indigofera growth

BACTINCTORIUM

2017

The Bactinctorium was a long-term collaborative research project with Alexandra Bachmayer, Geneviève Moisan, and Vanessa Mardirossian, exploring the potential of pigment-producing bacteria as textile dyes. The project brought traditional textile dye techniques into dialogue with bacteriological protocols, developing new transdisciplinary methodologies grounded in both craft and microbiological practice.

Situated within both the grow-it-yourself movement and the slow textile movement, the project sought to subvert, democratize, and disrupt industrial dye systems. Through a feminist DIYbio approach, the group developed a novel protocol for menstrual blood agar—the first of its kind—as a substrate for cultivating iron-loving bacteria used in the dyeing process.

BIOMATERIA: BIOTEXTILE CRAFT

2014-2016

Biomateria: Biotextile Craft is an award-winning research-creation project and mixed media installation that engages vital materiality across textile practice, wet biology laboratory techniques, and micro-ecological systems. The works investigate aesthetic, conceptual, and practical intersections through a relationship between nonhuman agents (mammalian cells) and human technological and creative industry. Textile-based forms are developed as living substrates, seeded with mammalian cell lines and shaped through processes of growth, care, and material negotiation.

The works operate across both actual and representational registers. Scientific processes, institutional frameworks, and artistic manipulations are presented in tandem, highlighting tensions between applied research, bureaucratic constraint, and creative interpretation.

CRAFTING BIOTEXTILES

2014

Crafting Biotextiles resulted from a 15-week research-creation residency at SymbioticA International Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts, investigating the application of textile patterning and structural integrity to the construction of organic matrices for tissue engineering. Custom 3D-printed weaving tools were developed and integrated directly into the cultures, remaining embedded as both functional and conceptual components of the laboratory apparatus. The research also extended into an investigation of overlaps between histological laboratory techniques and textile methods, including staining and dyeing, further collapsing distinctions between scientific and craft-based approaches to material transformation.