A Stitched Survey of the Dyer’s Garden

 Artist Christiane Berghoff mainly works with sustainable textiles, having studied Art and Environment at Falmouth University. 

For her Creative Exchange project she worked in an area of the walled garden on the Penryn Campus, planting and nurturing a variety of plants selected for the purpose of botanically dying textiles and for their value to insect pollinators. She worked in collaboration with PhD student Will Hawkes, an environmental biologist at the University of Exeter whose research is concerned with recording the migratory behaviour of insect life. Berghoff used the insect data Hawkes collects from the Dyer’s Garden to stitch a textile graph on natural linen, using woollen threads dyed with plants from the garden. The exhibition also displayed ephemera and equipment from the plant-dying process and a series of images taken of Berghoff and Hawkes in the Dyer’s Garden over the summer.

With special thanks to Alastair Garnett form the Grounds Team and Jessica Knapp for their support throughout this project.