Quiet Entanglements: Shoelaces and Post-Natural Ecologies

This project begins with a deceptively simple question: what happens to the textiles we never see — the seconds, flawed items, and returns that are discarded before reaching the consumer?

Working in dialogue with Sole Responsibility, a Yorkshire-based SME that diverts unsold and returned fashion from landfill, I investigate the overlooked afterlives of textile components, focusing on the humble shoelace. By melting and fusing discarded shoelaces onto dried heather, grasses, and stone, I expose their petrochemical nature and explore how synthetic materials mimic, infiltrate, and entangle with organic forms.

The resulting works are delicate yet unsettling: root-like structures that hover between growth and contamination, beauty and unease. They reflect a post-natural condition in which plastics quietly enter soils, landscapes, and ecological systems, often unnoticed.

Bringing together artistic practice and sustainability discourse, this project considers how textiles move not only through systems of commerce, but also through land, memory, and imagination — and how art can act as a provocation, making hidden material realities visible and open to rethinking.