Reflecting on our resilient rivers

I took part in Thames 21’s London Rivers week last week, running a Walking and Stitching workshop along the river Wandle. The theme for the week was “climate resilient rivers”, so alongside my workshop I created a piece of embroidered art, “Resilience”, from litter I picked up along the Wandle Trail. 

The Wandle has certainly had to be resilient - over the centuries it has been the power source or vital component of many different industries, and became heavily polluted as a result. The river was culverted into concrete channels and was forced on a subterranean journey under Southside shopping centre.


Efforts to restore the river began in the 1970s, and required the cooperation of the entire river catchment area - local councils, water companies, local industries and residents. The development of the Wandle Trail linked local parks and green spaces to create a green corridor along the river where wildlife thrived, and opened the river up to people for walking, cycling and angling. 

Unsurprisingly, a fair amount of litter ends up in or along the banks of the Wandle, but the river has a strong community of people who care for it, and the path keeps it visible - incidents of pollution or fly-tipping are reported and dealt with, often by members of the community themselves.


In my artwork, the sweet wrappers, bread bags and crisp packets are just a symptom of the problems the Wandle faces. In an era where profit is prized above all else, the Wandle is regularly polluted by sewage discharges from Thames Water, but I can’t make art from biohazards like the ropes of wet wipes I’ve found on river clean-ups, floating under the surface like a revolting parody of the weeds they are choking.



All the items I picked up were single-use plastic, made from oil. If we really want our rivers to be climate-resilient, we have to look at global solutions to the problem. Fossil fuels are a major driver of the climate change that will make our rivers more liable to flood or run dry. It certainly isn’t a waste of time to spend our time downstream, looking after our rivers on a local level through clean-ups and habitat management, but we also have to take our fight for our waterways upstream To the water companies who see them as a convenient solution to their lack of investment, and to governments to legislate for better water quality and an end to the single-use plastic that marrs the beauty of our rivers. 

Discarded At Kiosk, Salford Quays

 DISCARDED

Discarded is an exploration of the short and uneventful lives led by fast fashion garments from brands with headquarters in the UK, focussing on brands with their headquarters in Manchester. From garments in charity shops that have never been worn, to garments thrown out with household rubbish, this project seeks to highlight the waste of resources, the exploitation of workers and the pollution problems that the overproduction of fast fashion causes, and to create new and exciting realities for these unwanted garments. A mixture of textile art and photography, Discarded will be on display at Kiosk, Quayside Shopping Centre, Salford Quays, from 26th April to 21st May. The opening week coincides with Fashion Revolution Week in 2023, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse, which killed 1134 garment workers who were making clothes for international fashion brands.

Artists Elly Platt and CL Gamble use unwanted clothing to create a series of varied works, from playful polaroids of a capsule wardrobe of street finds, through upcycled and refashioned clothing carrying messages about our current fast fashion industry, to works of wearable art conveying messages about our relationships with our clothes, from the personal and private to the public and global.

THE EVENTS

To launch the exhibition and to coincide with two of Fashion Revolution Week’s ongoing campaigns, Elly Platt and CL Gamble will be running two events at Kiosk.

Loved Clothes Last is a storytelling and stitching performance: Elly and CL will speak about their family textile connections, and practices of sewing or mending as acts of healing and care, as they stitch textiles that hold a special meaning for them. This will be followed by an informal chat with Alison Carlin, creator of Kiosk, focusing on how to build more meaningful relationships with our clothes.

Wednesday 26th April, 4-6pm.

The Clothing Love Story workshop is a chance for anyone to share their thoughts about their favourite clothes by writing a short love letter to a beloved garment on upcycled fabric patches. These patches will be used to create a textile installation that will remain at Kiosk after the exhibition finishes, a reminder that a genuine love of clothing is at the heart of the sustainable fashion movement.

Saturday 29th April, 1-4pm.

THE ARTISTS

Discarded is a collaboration between Elly Platt and CL Gamble.

Elly Platt (she/her) is a costume maker and textile artist, also known as Take It Up Wear It Out. Her love of telling stories through clothing has taken many forms, from visible mending to stitching or painting protest textile art in response to injustice against garment workers. 

The pandemic led her to create site-specific work over the course of two years. The Wandle Wardrobe project drew its raw materials from a series of walks along the Wandle Trail in South London where Elly collected lost or discarded textiles, which she then transformed into precious objects or wearable works of art.The River Wandle has a rich history as a site of textile production and is also an ecological success story. The Wandle Wardrobe explores how our relationship with the river has changed, how our lost clothes might suggest the ways we interact with the natural world, and how we view the clothes we own and wear today. In an era where clothes are so cheap and plentiful, have we lost our emotional attachment to them?

As a person who makes clothing, Elly seeks to spotlight the disrespect fast fashion brands show to the skills and expertise of garment workers when they sell their clothes as disposable. 

CL Gamble is a queer, disabled artist whose work delves into politics, protest and collective action. Their current body of work “Above The Law” is an intermedia work set in a world they describe as “The Paris Commune meets No Deal Brexit in a Handmaid’s Tale-style speculative fiction future”.

Examining ideas around commodification, market forces and socioeconomic deprivation, the use of hobbycraft subverts the idea that refined skills create value in some objects and not others. Using a mix of installation, graphic design, performance and world-building, they centre the transactional nature not only of art itself, but our everyday survival needs.

The use of salvaged materials and locally foraged gemstones asks us to examine our consumption habits while describing a group of rebels consciously objecting to a society ravaged by austerity and psychogeographical borders. ‘Artistic Anarchy’ aims to destroy those borders, bringing approachable, affordable jewellery from a provocative conceptual world into the white cubes of traditional gallery spaces.

As we face a climate crisis, cost of living increases and the impact of more than a decade of funding cuts to vital services, you are invited to add your voice to the call of the many, not the few: Bread for all, but roses too.

WHAT IS THE BACKGROUND TO FASHION REVOLUTION WEEK AND THE RANA PLAZA DISASTER ANNIVERSARY?

On the 24th April 2013, the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed. 1134 garment workers died, and more than 2500 were injured, many of them severely. They had been making clothes for fast fashion brands and other western retailers whose labels were found in the wreckage. Workers had noticed cracks appearing in the building the previous day, and were reluctant to return to work. The threats of docked wages for people who have barely enough money to survive sealed their fate. The factory collapse made global news, and led activists to campaign for change in the industry on many fronts. Better transparency from fashion brands, so consumers would know where their clothes really came from. Better pay, conditions and the right to unionise for garment workers. And more knowledge of what really goes on behind the scenes of popular fashion brands. 

 

The hope was to slow the fast fashion juggernaut, leading to better choices being made by more conscious and ethically-minded consumers, and better lives for the people who make our clothes. In reality, the pace of fast fashion has only increased, with new brands producing clothes that are considered almost disposable. The exploitation of garment workers in the Global South continues to be a huge problem, but it’s happening here in the UK too, where we assume minimum wage legislation, working time directive rules and other checks and balances would prevent this mistreatment of the people who make our clothes.

WHY MANCHESTER SPECIFICALLY?

Historically, Manchester has a place at the centre of the UK textile industry as the site of hundreds of cotton mills and other textile factories. Today, Manchester is home to the headquarters of some of the UK’s worst offenders when it comes to creating fast fashion from exploited labour. Activists have protested outside the Manchester headquarters of BooHoo when the company attempted to prevent unionisation by workers. The 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster will see creatives and activists come together in Manchester to commemorate this tragedy, spotlight the ongoing problems with the fast fashion industry and highlight the need for better regulation and legislation to control the industry’s exploitation of people and the planet.

 

WHY ARE ELLY AND CL DOING THIS?

We both love clothes! We love the theatrics and the creativity of expressing ourselves through our personal style. We both keep clothes for decades, adding to our wardrobes by hunting through thrift stores, charity shops and even finding things by the side of the road!  We love the freedom of feeling truly yourself in an outfit that’s perfect for a certain moment, and then remixing those clothes into a totally different style for the next month, or year, or decade. 

 

We don’t love the conformity that underpins so much of the fast fashion industry, where hundreds of thousands of styles are available every day but somehow everyone looks the same. We want all garment workers, wherever they might live, to be paid a living wage, to have a safe work environment and to be respected for their skills and expertise. We want clothes to be worn again and again, to hold memories, to be considered precious. We don’t want clothes to be unworn, unloved, discarded.

Walking and Stitching workshops

On 17th September 2022 I ran my first Walking and Stitching Workshop as part of Wandle Fortnight. I took participants for a gentle stroll along the Wandle Trail from Hackbridge Community Gardens to Honeywood Museum, with four half-hour stops along the way to try out some experimental embroidery to capture the beauty and character of the river. Embroidery is often seen as a precise and time-consuming art form, and I longed to combine my love of embroidery with my love of the outdoors. I tried out a series of alfresco embroidery “sketches”; the equivalent of a short pose in a life drawing class, using basic stitches and fabric scraps. I advertised the workshop for anyone who knew vaguely how to thread a needle, because this workshop wasn’t going to be about perfect stitching, it was going to be about capturing an impression, a moment in time in a constantly changing landscape.

The structure of the Stitching the Wandle workshop consisted of four prompts, one for each of the locations we’d stop at for 30 minutes to create an embroidered “sketch”. I shared all four prompts at the start of the workshop, giving everyone the opportunity to work on four separate sketches, to keep adding to the same one, or to use any of the elements they felt particularly drawn to.

The first prompt was the river itself - the quality of the water, the flow, reflections, different perspectives of river dwellers, the river bed, the geology that has created a chalk stream in South London. In the calm surroundings of the Hackbridge Community Garden, it’s easy to tune out the traffic and tune in to the presence of the river. How do you convey the flow of a clear chalk stream through fabric and stitch? What techniques do you use when you only have thirty minutes? So close to the source, the Wandle is beautifully clear, shallow, the stony river bed visible but distorted by the current, the reflections on the surface.

 
My second prompt for a 30 minute “sketch” on the Stitching the Wandle walk was the natural environment, and I think the corner of Wilderness Island provided the perfect location. The overhanging willow trees, the banks of rushes and irises, the far bank with its thick overgrown vegetation. We passed a dead tree covered in bracket fungus, so there was a wealth of inspiration from an individual leaf to the mycelial network underpinning the whole ecosystem. Half an hour is far too short a time to carefully stitch such a lush landscape, so I used scraps of fabric to suggest the thick vegetation. 

I also managed to snap a photo during my workshop of all the participants engrossed in their stitching. It was a joy to have such a lovely group of people testing out my new workshop idea, and I’m so glad everyone enjoyed it! 

The third prompt on my “Stitching the Wandle” walk was the path - the act of walking, your relationship to the path, the path’s surface, proximity to the river, elevation. My walks along the Wandle Trail are usually very intentional - I rarely wear headphones, and if I’m travelling somewhere I factor in extra time so I can enjoy my surroundings on the way without feeling rushed. So this piece looks the most like a sampler as I considered the act of walking, placing one foot in front of the other, and the textures of the path I was walking on. The smoothness of manmade tarmac, the crunch of gravel, the way mud pulls at each footstep and holds on to an impression of you. The Wandle Trail isn’t always my most direct route to a nearby destination, but it’s always the most enjoyable, so I’m happy to take those meanders, spend that extra fifteen minutes. 

The fourth prompt for my “Stitching the Wandle” workshop was the built landscape - the buildings that surround the river, materials and structure, manmade green landscapes, the tensions or cohesion between the build environment and the river. Near one of the sources of the Wandle in Carshalton, the built landscape has celebrated the river as a feature. Carshalton Ponds force traffic along narrow roads, past historic buildings. Grove Park is neatly landscaped around the Wandle, newer housing estates have been built with room for a cycle track and a footpath beside the river. The river is contained and managed by this landscape, but it’s also very visible. As the area between Carshalton and Hackbridge has been steadily built up over the last hundred years, the river has been a key feature of the area - it hasn’t been forced underground like other London rivers (or even other downstream sections of the Wandle). I attempted to capture this idea of suburban sprawl with the river at its heart in my embroidered sketch.


With spring on its way, and the promise of longer, warmer days, I’m looking forward to running more Stitching the Wandle workshops this year! Keep an eye on my Instagram for updates.