Crafting Futures Mexico

Dalila Cruz is a Oaxacan student at Tomas Bata University, researching biomaterials and biocomposites, trying to find better materials that are nature-based. She likes to use materials that can take us closer to nature. She has worked with textiles, metals, ceramics, wood, paper and bioplastics. previously, she has collaborated with Yahir Trujillo, Claudio Gerónimo and Juan Ruiz, artists from Oaxaca.

Dalila is creating Desironment, a media to share environmental issues and ecological creations that are friendly to the environment.

‘First, I was working with Lynne Hocking-Mennie and Colectivo Bii Daüü to create textiles with different patterns corresponding to different sounds from nature and the daily life inTeotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca.

I also worked with Soledad (from the Colectivo Bii Daüü) and Fiona to create panels that tell us a story about our practices and our connection with the wool, with the sustainability and our identity. I used one paper-based fish scale, embroidering it with wool from Mexico and Scotland, dyed with natural plants from both countries.‘

Kate wears many hats (or masks): she is a designer-maker (developing original garment styles and patterns for hand-knitting); a writer (the author of more than 20 books whose subjects range from feminist literary history to craft and disability); the owner of a small business KDD & Company (publishing books, manufacturing yarn and small-scale knitwear and using the company’s commercial arm to support a range of non-profitable artistic endeavours). In short, Kate enjoys making things—whether it’s a poem, a creative business, or a piece of art—and she loves learning about making. What she produces often combines the intellectual with the practical, and she strongly believes that critical enquiry and creative thinking can go very much hand in hand. The Crafting Futures residency provided an unparalleled opportunity for her to learn from other makers, both Mexican and Scottish, and opened a creative door which took her practice in a completely new direction.

‘During our residency in Braemar and the Isle of Lewis, we discovered how, in both Scotland and Mexico, textile traditions and landscapes were mutually defining and were able to share our own regional craft skills with each other, from natural dyeing to embroidery. For me personally, learning how to inkle weave completely from scratch with supportive Mexican and Scottish makers was crucial: helping me to approach this project with a completely open, beginner’s mind.  After the residency, exchanging pen-pal letters and objects with my collaboration partner, Pilar, allowed for a more playful and exploratory approach to Mexican / Scottish differences and connections. We discussed how popular culture, play and humour had been absolutely key to shaping our own creative identities, and discovered a shared childhood love of costume and dressing up. We brought our cultural aesthetics and senses of fun together in the work we then created: each inspired by the other to develop our own Cadaver Exquisito, a delicious bricolage of Mexican and Scottish flavours. In the trickster creatures Pilar and I designed and made for each other, cultural identity is something you can playfully exchange, embrace, defy, swap out, dress up in, put on, or take off.’

Read more about the work Kate developed following her residency in her Behind the Mask blog and enjoy some more images in Quieres bailar?