creator-in-focus
creator-in-focus
Nothing New: Vibhuti Amin, a chemist turned material researcher, is growing dye from bacteria to keep a 23-step craft alive
“We already know how to work with planetary ways of making. We’ve lost that along the way.”
Milan Design Week this year was full of the future: AI, robotics, Samsung and Sony with their small intelligent objects. Somewhere in among it was a hand-painted textile that looked, to most people walking past, like something old. “I remember thinking, oh, it’s only the old people that are looking at the craft,” Vibhuti says. “All the old people loved it.” What nobody could see was that the cloth had been dyed with living bacteria. She grew up in India, studied chemistry, and was headed for medicine. By the end of the degree she knew she couldn’t continue. “I need to do something creative.” Fashion had always interested her, but after years of social work and volunteering tied to medicine, it felt thin. So the question became how to make the industry do something useful, and how to put a chemistry background to work inside it. Material Futures at Central Saint Martins was the answer. “I was like, hey, this is exactly me.” She arrived planning to do biomaterial innovation for sustainable fashion. What she found over the first year was that she wanted the science anchored in something. Community work, social research, the things that material innovation usually floats above. She was reading about climate colonialism. She took a course on the colonial history of Indian textiles. “I need my last project to sit at the intersection of colonialism, climate, textiles and science.” Kalamkari comes from the southeastern coast of India. The name has Persian roots from the Mughal era and translates as penwork: the cloth is hand-painted, not printed. Traditionally it runs to 23 steps of natural dyeing, deeply dependent on climate, worked in relationship with rivers and local ecologies. It flourished under colonial trade, and it was Kalamkari that drove the invention of textile printing in the West, which then took the craft apart at home. Revival efforts exist. In Srikalahasti, by her account, one artisan still practises the traditional process. He is fourth generation. The ecology the craft depends on has gone. The soils are too polluted to grow many of the dye plants. The seasons bring months of flooding, then drought. Vibhuti's project proposes bacterial dyes as a climate-resilient route for the next generation of artisans. The pigments come from living organisms rather than plants that the land can no longer support.
She went to Srikalahasti in October and interviewed the artisan. At the end she asked whether he painted in the ordinary way as well. He said yes but that it wasn’t the same thing. Kalamkari involves the mind and the body together. The way you control the kalam, the pen, is tied to the way you breathe. That stayed with her. Her argument about the fashion industry has always been about slowing production down and working with the rhythms of the natural world, and here was a craftsman describing his work as a form of breathing. The motif kept reappearing. The bacteria need oxygen and aeration to produce pigment; they only make colour as they grow. And Srikalahasti itself is built around a temple of Shiva dedicated to the element of air, where a flame is said to burn permanently with no air source anywhere near it. “It felt like it was part of the town, the craft, the science.” She went back to Persian for the name. Nafas means breath. Nafas Kari: breathwork. The research on bacterial dyes is mostly on protein fibres, where the pigment binds well. Kalamkari is done on cotton. When she set out, her tutors suggested she reconsider the craft, bacterial dyes leak, and cotton would make it very hard. She went ahead anyway. What eventually made it work wasn’t a new fixative. It was the craft’s own preparation: the fermentation processes used for indigo, the treatment of cloth in milk that gives the dye something to hold onto. This is the part of the project that carries the argument. She is interested in material innovation — it’s the chemistry in her — but she is unconvinced by most of what the field produces. “So much ecological knowledge already exists in the previous ways or historical ways of making,” she says. “If you look at Indian crafts from centuries ago, it was all sustainable ways of making. They were all place-based. They were in dialogue with nature. They were never taking more than they could produce.” Her conclusion is blunter than the sector is used to. “We already know how to work with planetary ways of making. We’ve lost that along the way.” The innovation she wants to see is the kind that works with communities already holding that knowledge and already carrying the damage the industry caused.
The bioreactor came later, and the reason for it is the most instructive story in the project.
On her return trip to Srikalahasti she worked with a local university to set up pigment growth inside the artisan’s workshop, a self-sustaining system, built low-tech. Temperature regulation was an icebox cooler. She called two weeks later to ask how the pigments were doing. He’d had to go to Delhi. The culture looked dirty. He threw it away. “I realised, okay, it’s too many steps for the artisan,” she says. He is a man in his sixties running a workshop, not a lab technician. So she designed something to take the steps away: a bioreactor that regulates its own temperature, where the artisan presses a button and pigment comes out.
It also solved a problem she hadn’t set out to solve. At Milan, the work read as traditional and drew the audience that reads traditional. With the bioreactor at the CSM grad show, people from the industrial and scientific worlds came to look. She is clear-eyed about why. It looks good, it moves. “My bioreactor got a lot of CSM news content and stuff, because it looks cool and it’s shaking, which obviously ignores the entire craft perspective on it.”
Asked whether anyone in the UK has flattened the work into sustainable textile innovation and skipped the colonial history underneath, her answer is more interesting than a yes. The futurist press, she says, never came. The outlets that cover new materials went for the Mars-adjacent, speculative end of her cohort’s work. Bacterial dye is familiar enough in sustainability circles now that it didn’t read as novel. Who did come were people drawn by the social argument. The CSM award she received was for regeneration. “No one ever contacted me to say cool bioreactor.”
That isn’t to say the framing was easy. After her first presentation, one tutor told her he didn’t understand why the colonial history mattered. “I remember being really upset,” she says. “I was like, they don’t understand my project.” She found her footing elsewhere in the institution, through CSM Changemakers, working on decolonial and anti-racist thinking in the education department. The course gave her the design and the output. The community gave her the framework. “It is the kind of subject that not everyone is necessarily fully moved by,” she says. “But there are a lot of people out there who care.”
She has just started on the innovation team at Future Fabrics Expo, working across startups and learning how the existing industry actually functions. A fellowship from India runs alongside it until March. The plan is to go back to Srikalahasti later this year and install the bioreactor properly, with the aim of a fully working bacterial dye system inside the workshop. After that, other craft clusters: chay root, the traditional red, can no longer be grown across much of the region, and the crafts that depended on it are stranded. She wants a small capsule collection in Kalamkari with bacterial dye by the end of the fellowship.
Check out @vibhutiamin on Instagram
Nothing New: Vibhuti Amin, a chemist turned material researcher, is growing dye from bacteria to keep a 23-step craft alive
Nothing New: Vibhuti Amin, a chemist turned material researcher, is growing dye from bacteria to keep a 23-step craft alive
Nothing New: Vibhuti Amin, a chemist turned material researcher, is growing dye from bacteria to keep a 23-step craft alive
“We already know how to work with planetary ways of making. We’ve lost that along the way.”
Milan Design Week this year was full of the future: AI, robotics, Samsung and Sony with their small intelligent objects. Somewhere in among it was a hand-painted textile that looked, to most people walking past, like something old. “I remember thinking, oh, it’s only the old people that are looking at the craft,” Vibhuti says. “All the old people loved it.” What nobody could see was that the cloth had been dyed with living bacteria. She grew up in India, studied chemistry, and was headed for medicine. By the end of the degree she knew she couldn’t continue. “I need to do something creative.” Fashion had always interested her, but after years of social work and volunteering tied to medicine, it felt thin. So the question became how to make the industry do something useful, and how to put a chemistry background to work inside it. Material Futures at Central Saint Martins was the answer. “I was like, hey, this is exactly me.” She arrived planning to do biomaterial innovation for sustainable fashion. What she found over the first year was that she wanted the science anchored in something. Community work, social research, the things that material innovation usually floats above. She was reading about climate colonialism. She took a course on the colonial history of Indian textiles. “I need my last project to sit at the intersection of colonialism, climate, textiles and science.” Kalamkari comes from the southeastern coast of India. The name has Persian roots from the Mughal era and translates as penwork: the cloth is hand-painted, not printed. Traditionally it runs to 23 steps of natural dyeing, deeply dependent on climate, worked in relationship with rivers and local ecologies. It flourished under colonial trade, and it was Kalamkari that drove the invention of textile printing in the West, which then took the craft apart at home. Revival efforts exist. In Srikalahasti, by her account, one artisan still practises the traditional process. He is fourth generation. The ecology the craft depends on has gone. The soils are too polluted to grow many of the dye plants. The seasons bring months of flooding, then drought. Vibhuti's project proposes bacterial dyes as a climate-resilient route for the next generation of artisans. The pigments come from living organisms rather than plants that the land can no longer support.
She went to Srikalahasti in October and interviewed the artisan. At the end she asked whether he painted in the ordinary way as well. He said yes but that it wasn’t the same thing. Kalamkari involves the mind and the body together. The way you control the kalam, the pen, is tied to the way you breathe. That stayed with her. Her argument about the fashion industry has always been about slowing production down and working with the rhythms of the natural world, and here was a craftsman describing his work as a form of breathing. The motif kept reappearing. The bacteria need oxygen and aeration to produce pigment; they only make colour as they grow. And Srikalahasti itself is built around a temple of Shiva dedicated to the element of air, where a flame is said to burn permanently with no air source anywhere near it. “It felt like it was part of the town, the craft, the science.” She went back to Persian for the name. Nafas means breath. Nafas Kari: breathwork. The research on bacterial dyes is mostly on protein fibres, where the pigment binds well. Kalamkari is done on cotton. When she set out, her tutors suggested she reconsider the craft, bacterial dyes leak, and cotton would make it very hard. She went ahead anyway. What eventually made it work wasn’t a new fixative. It was the craft’s own preparation: the fermentation processes used for indigo, the treatment of cloth in milk that gives the dye something to hold onto. This is the part of the project that carries the argument. She is interested in material innovation — it’s the chemistry in her — but she is unconvinced by most of what the field produces. “So much ecological knowledge already exists in the previous ways or historical ways of making,” she says. “If you look at Indian crafts from centuries ago, it was all sustainable ways of making. They were all place-based. They were in dialogue with nature. They were never taking more than they could produce.” Her conclusion is blunter than the sector is used to. “We already know how to work with planetary ways of making. We’ve lost that along the way.” The innovation she wants to see is the kind that works with communities already holding that knowledge and already carrying the damage the industry caused.
The bioreactor came later, and the reason for it is the most instructive story in the project.
On her return trip to Srikalahasti she worked with a local university to set up pigment growth inside the artisan’s workshop, a self-sustaining system, built low-tech. Temperature regulation was an icebox cooler. She called two weeks later to ask how the pigments were doing. He’d had to go to Delhi. The culture looked dirty. He threw it away. “I realised, okay, it’s too many steps for the artisan,” she says. He is a man in his sixties running a workshop, not a lab technician. So she designed something to take the steps away: a bioreactor that regulates its own temperature, where the artisan presses a button and pigment comes out.
It also solved a problem she hadn’t set out to solve. At Milan, the work read as traditional and drew the audience that reads traditional. With the bioreactor at the CSM grad show, people from the industrial and scientific worlds came to look. She is clear-eyed about why. It looks good, it moves. “My bioreactor got a lot of CSM news content and stuff, because it looks cool and it’s shaking, which obviously ignores the entire craft perspective on it.”
Asked whether anyone in the UK has flattened the work into sustainable textile innovation and skipped the colonial history underneath, her answer is more interesting than a yes. The futurist press, she says, never came. The outlets that cover new materials went for the Mars-adjacent, speculative end of her cohort’s work. Bacterial dye is familiar enough in sustainability circles now that it didn’t read as novel. Who did come were people drawn by the social argument. The CSM award she received was for regeneration. “No one ever contacted me to say cool bioreactor.”
That isn’t to say the framing was easy. After her first presentation, one tutor told her he didn’t understand why the colonial history mattered. “I remember being really upset,” she says. “I was like, they don’t understand my project.” She found her footing elsewhere in the institution, through CSM Changemakers, working on decolonial and anti-racist thinking in the education department. The course gave her the design and the output. The community gave her the framework. “It is the kind of subject that not everyone is necessarily fully moved by,” she says. “But there are a lot of people out there who care.”
She has just started on the innovation team at Future Fabrics Expo, working across startups and learning how the existing industry actually functions. A fellowship from India runs alongside it until March. The plan is to go back to Srikalahasti later this year and install the bioreactor properly, with the aim of a fully working bacterial dye system inside the workshop. After that, other craft clusters: chay root, the traditional red, can no longer be grown across much of the region, and the crafts that depended on it are stranded. She wants a small capsule collection in Kalamkari with bacterial dye by the end of the fellowship.
Check out @vibhutiamin on Instagram
Underrated?
Underrated and undeniably cool?