Plants and Creative Practice 3: Textile Arts
| Dates: | 11 May 2026 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 18:15 |
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| What is it: | Webinar |
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| Organiser: | Creative Manchester |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Arianna Tozzi, Rowland Ricketts |
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The finale of the Plants and Creative Practice online event series
In this final event of the Plants and Creative Practice webinar series, cultural geographer Arianna Tozzi (UoM, Hallsworth Research Fellow Geography) and artist Rowland Ricketts (IU, Eskenazi) will consider different ways of engaging with plant-based materials, processes and histories in textile arts. Tozzi’s current project examines the history of cotton monocultures in central India and involves partnerships with women-led agroecology groups. Ricketts’ artistic practice involves utilizing natural dyes and historical processes to create contemporary textiles that span art and design.
About the series: What do plants have to do with creative work? How can creativity evolve through engagement with plantlife? Does partnering with plants change our understanding of ‘creativity’ or reframe creative methods and processes? This webinar series from Indiana University’s Environmental Futures in the Arts and Humanities Initiative and the University of Manchester’s Creative Manchester research platform explores Plants and Creative Practice through three dialogues between researchers, writers and artists based at these two universities. Each session pairs creative/research practitioners in focused conversations on how plant life shapes creative work across Poetry, Sound, and Textile Arts to reflect upon how vegetal thinking can shape artistic practice today.
This event is only open to staff and students from University of Manchester, or Indiana University Bloomington
Timings
5 - 6:15pm - Manchester, UK (GMT)
12 - 1:15pm Bloomington, Indiana (EDT)
Speakers
Arianna Tozzi
Biography: Arianna Tozzi is a Hallsworth Fellow at the University of Manchester researching processes of agrarian transformation and grassroots-led approaches to social and environmental change. Her work draws on environmental humanities, feminist political ecology, and critical agrarian studies to understand how agrarian and climate crises are experienced, contested, and reimagined through everyday farming practices—particularly those of women and other marginalized actors. For her current project, Arianna engages interdisciplinary artistic approaches, exploring how such methods can expand current understandings of the legacies of extractive monocultures and their contemporary resonances.
Rowland Ricketts
Biography: Rowland Ricketts utilizes natural dyes and historical processes to create contemporary textiles that span art and design. Trained in indigo farming and dyeing in Japan, Rowland received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2005 and is currently a Provost Professor in Indiana University’s Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design.
Travel and Contact Information
