The introduction of foreign substances into the Thames has been commonplace ever since people have lived on its banks. Levels of pollution have morphed, grown, and shrunk with the passing of time. I chose a 13 mile stretch, Richmond to Woolwich, along the Thames. I collected water at 9 locations and sampled the substance levels with a
citizen scientist approach, before processing the data to better understand the river. With each water sample I dyed untreated wool with onion skins. The colour of the dye acts as a visual indicator for the pollution levels within each of these moving territories. This data has been translated into a coded weaving, using the dyed fibres, allowing the viewer to question the health of the river through the shifts in colour at each location.
The weaving sits alongside an instruction manual, designed so that anyone can follow the same process as me, with any river they choose. It is for people who also want to collect their own data and analyse it in order to understand the environment in a slightly different way - a way that enables them to examine the overlap between citizen science and natural dyeing, and begin to build a bigger map of textile pollution within rivers.
At first glance it seems that the weaving is simply an aesthetic layout. The manual is the tool for communicating the concept and elevating the content. Only when the audience has engaged with the scientific context can they fully decipher and understand the compositional language of the textile.
