We are delighted to share more details of the Programme, Speakers and Talks at seam collective Textile Talks in October.

You can buy tickets for the event here

Programme

To reduce the cost of tickets, lunch is not included in the ticket price. You are welcome to bring a packed lunch or support one of the many lovely local businesses in Somerton. Refreshments will include teas, coffees and water. 

Speakers

Judith van den Boom

With over 15 years of international expertise, Judith is an avid lecturer and consultant, collaborating with partners globally. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art and is pursuing a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University, developing regenerative relational frameworks to deepen ecology and design alliances. Judith co-founded UFƟ Unidentified Facility, a research group to explore future ecologies and experimental processes. Her earlier design work as studio BoomWehmeyer was grounded in hands-on processes, reimagining making as dialogue and extensively exhibited in Europe and Asia. For Judith craft is about much more than the process and material to achieve an outcome. Rather, it is a tool for presence, awareness and exploring relationships in ways that help to transcend to a richer sense of self, a new sense of connectedness, with others, and more sustainable ways of living.

Website: csmregenerativedesign.com
www.unidentifiedfacility.org
Linked in: linkedin.com/in/judithboomwehmeyer

Talk 2 – 11.30am

Warped and Wasted: A Collective Process to Practice Life, explores how we can understand sustainability not as a passive concept, but as an active, living learning practice that is relational, collective, and integrated with environmental care. Drawing on the process of seam collective, we’ll unpack how sustainability is more than a material concern. It connects diversity, locality, cycles, and care.

We’ll explore how working collectively, learning from, and designing for nature can guide us to new knowledge, applications, and ways of seeing, ultimately helping us restore and reimagine our relationships with the world. Central to this has been a collaborative learning journey of Warped and Wasted: experimenting together, sharing skills and perspectives, questioning assumptions, and holding space for discussion. Through workshops, hands-on making, explorations, and collective modes of working, seam has co-developed its response to becoming sustainable in both ecological and social contexts. This process, with all its uncertainties, tensions, and translations, has been pivotal to frame sustainability as practice and process.

How does sustainability feel in a collective process? How do we engage place as partner? How do we show and embody this through our work and daily actions? This talk invites us to rethink how we are community, as artistic practice, as interconnected network, and as part of a living planet.

Paula Orrell

Paula will speak on the role of the visual arts as vital cultural infrastructure and as a driver of social and economic growth. Drawing on her leadership of CVAN and national advocacy work, she will explore how visual arts, including textiles, contribute to health, innovation, and place-making, and why long-term investment and policy reform are crucial. Her contribution will spotlight current challenges — including precarity, underfunding, and lack of representation — while offering a roadmap for building a more resilient and inclusive ecosystem. Paula will also explore how artists and arts organisations can shape policy and influence structural change.

Helen Carnac

Warped and Wasted in-conversation, during this question-and-answer conversational session, Helen and seam collective members will reflect on how the group’s approach to textiles, art, sustainability and collaboration has developed during the development of the Warped and Wasted project. We will discuss how the collective members have engaged with a range of subjects during meetings and making processes, touching on some of the challenges they have faced during the process and how they have overcome them.

Heath Lowndes