MATERIAL RELATIONS ONLINE COURSE WITH ROSALIND FOWLER

MATERIAL RELATIONS
ONLINE COURSE
WITH ROSALIND FOWLER
JANUARY - MARCH 2027

Join us for a four-session online course exploring weaving with natural plant fibres as a practice of attention, connection and ecological relationship.

Material Relations: Slow Making, Weaving and Ecological Practice centres on the shared process of foraging, preparing and weaving natural plant fibres into a small basket or vessel. Working directly with these materials, you will develop practical skills while becoming more attuned to the plants themselves, the process of making and the environments they come from. We will explore weaving as an ancient communal practice, with knowledge and skills shared, adapted and developed across generations, asking what these traditions of making can teach us about care, reciprocity and our relationships with the natural world.

Led by artist Rosalind Fowler and hosted by IMT Gallery, the course combines practical weaving with sound and meditation exercises, reflection and discussion, drawing on contemporary art, craft and Indigenous weaving traditions. Throughout the course, we will consider how materials can hold memory and meaning, the vessel as a container of experience, intention and exchange, and the different rhythms of making by hand. Sound and meditation will create space to slow down and become more attentive to the qualities of the plant fibres, the movements involved in weaving and the experience of making alongside others.

Between sessions, Rosalind will share prompts for sourcing and preparing natural weaving materials from your local environment, and guidance to continue work on your vessel. Across the four sessions, you will develop weaving techniques and approaches that can be experimented with and built upon beyond the course, offering a starting point for an ongoing plant-fibre practice rooted in your own interests, creative work and the local environment.

Course Details

Dates: This is a four-session online course taking place on Sunday 17 January, 7 February, 21 February and 7 March 2027.

Live Sessions: Each session takes place online via Zoom from 3-5pm (GMT).

Recordings: All sessions will be recorded and made available to registered participants for a limited time. While attending live gives you the opportunity to take part in group discussions and creative exercises, recordings are available if you need to catch up.

Booking: Your booking includes access to all four sessions.

  🐦 Early Bird rates are available until Sunday 6 December at 11:59pm (GMT).

Film still by Rosalind Fowler

Session 1: Ecologies of Making

We will begin by turning our attention to ourselves, the gathered plant materials in our hands and the environments they come from. Placing natural-fibre weaving within traditional, contemporary artistic and ecological contexts, we will consider how this ancient practice can become an act of care, reciprocity and reconnection, shifting our perceptions of both our inner and local landscapes. We will draw on the weaving traditions of the Ye’kuana people of southern Venezuela, alongside the work of contemporary artists and makers Alice Fox, Cecilia Vicuña, and Fritz Haeg, and the writings of Tim Ingold and Robin Wall Kimmerer.

A meditative exercise and sound bath will help us slow down and become more aware of our bodies and the earth beneath our feet. Through sensory encounters with texture, smell, sight and touch, you will begin to develop a closer relationship with the plant materials we will be working with over the coming weeks. Rosalind will then introduce the practical processes of foraging, stripping, drying and preparing plants from your local environment, alongside prompts for observing and reflecting on your experiences as you prepare the materials for your vessel.

Film still by Rosalind Fowler

Session 2: Animist Materialism

Drawing on the ideas of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and theorist Donna Haraway, we will approach animism as a way of understanding plant materials not as inert matter, but as active and relational, possessing their own agency. This approach invites us to recognise our own intrinsic interconnections with the materials we work with, and how attention and intention become part of the making process.

We will share our experiences of foraging and preparing plant fibres, reflecting on how materials can hold memory and how meaning is embedded in the act of making. Referencing the sculptures of Mrinalini Mukherjee alongside examples of basketry and weaving from different cultural traditions, we will examine the relationship between material, maker, community and environment.

Rosalind will guide us as we begin weaving our vessels, arranging and crossing the gathered fibres to form a base structure, then using a twining technique to weave the base. Weaving becomes both an individual and collective act, with opportunities to share reflections as our vessels begin to take shape.

Film still by Rosalind Fowler

Session 3: The Vessel

In this session, the vessel itself becomes our focus. Beyond their practical function, baskets can also serve as symbolic containers of experience, exchange, and stories, ideas we will consider through Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. As relational objects and sites of interconnection, what might they reveal about our relationships with one another and the world around us? Drawing on the woven sculptures of Ernesto Neto and Rosalind’s own work, Weaving the Vessel (2025), we will also approach the vessel through alchemical perspectives, as a space for the incubation and transformation of creative ideas and intentions, connecting our inner and outer worlds.

Sound and meditative exercises will support us as we continue weaving, forming the sides of our baskets and developing a repetitive rhythm through the movement of our hands. As the vessels take shape, we will reflect together on what it means to make, shape and hold space.

Film still by Rosalind Fowler

Session 4: Slow Time and Myth

The slow, repetitive rhythms of weaving by hand invite a different experience of time, one that might offer a form of resistance to contemporary pressures towards speed and consumption. In this final session, we will reflect on weaving as an ancestral practice stretching back thousands of years, carrying knowledge and skills essential to human survival, from the creation of baskets and nets to tools, boats and architecture, and consider how these inherited traditions might be woven into the present-future. We will trace the connections between weaving and mythical time, from the Navajo story of Spider Woman, who spins the world into being, to contemporary interpretations of myth-making in the work of artists such as Diana Scherer.

Sound and meditative exercises will accompany the final stages of weaving as we learn to create an edge or simple border for our baskets, bringing our vessels towards completion.

In preparation for this session, you will have been invited to find an object in your local environment that holds particular meaning for you, perhaps representing an idea or intention you wish to carry beyond the course. We will place these objects within our completed vessels as part of a closing ritual meditation, bringing together the materials, processes and intentions developed throughout our time together.

We’ll stay connected through a dedicated WhatsApp group, where participants can share reflections, ideas, and inspiration as the course unfolds.

About Rosalind Fowler

Rosalind Fowler is an artist whose practice seeks to cultivate and explore meaningful entanglements between environmental care and human healing through earth-based, analogue and digital practices. Working extensively with plants and plant matter, she has led workshops in social and contemporary art contexts, including at the William Morris Gallery, the Barbican, PEER, Kestle Barton and the Horniman Museum. Rosalind holds a practice-based PhD in performative folk rituals and embodied filmmaking. In 2020, she was commissioned by Camden Arts Centre to create an online plant connection guide to accompany the exhibition The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree. Her approach to this course is informed by her practice and training in plant-fibre weaving, sensory herbalism and sound therapy.

Recent projects include The Hands that Dreamed of New Suns (2026), a large-scale participatory sculpture commissioned for the Horniman Museum’s 125th anniversary, in which visitors collectively wove foraged natural materials into a giant basket beneath a sculptural sun. Her site-specific installation All is leaf, so to amplify the wonder, developed at Organiclea food growing cooperative in London, is featured in the Serpentine Gallery’s recent publication, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (2026).

This course is for artists, makers, designers, educators, herbalists, gardeners and anyone interested in working more closely with plants, natural materials and ecologically centred creative practices. Whether you are new to plant-fibre weaving or looking to expand an existing making practice, deepen your relationship with locally gathered materials or consider craft within wider artistic and ecological contexts, the course offers an accessible starting point.

Ready to experience a different rhythm of making? Reserve your place using the booking details below.