Anyone who has ever cut a finished piece from a loom knows the small heap that remains on the floor afterwards, odd lengths of yarn too short to be of any use and too good-looking to sweep up without a pang of dismay.
In Bhujodi, a weaving village in Gujarat, that heap has become the starting point for Rewoven: Skies and Waters, a collection of handwoven wall panels from Post Rejection Design (PRD). Conceptualised and designed by Hanisha Thirth BennaBhaktula and woven by artisan Mayur Vankar, each panel is built from threads gathered after other textiles were finished and returned to the loom to be woven again.
A trio of handwoven panels by Post Rejection Design, all created from rescued, post-production threads.
If you keep a bag of wool ends for later, you will recognise the appeal of the method, since here the remnants get a say. The yarn on hand decides the palette and the pace of each panel. Irregular passages that a weaver might usually hide stay on view, and fragments from earlier cloth steer the design as it grows.
Across the finished surfaces, turtles swim and fireflies glow among lines that suggest moving water and shifting light. Look closely and you can see how the fragments have been reorganised, each yarn carrying traces of its earlier life.
Firefly panel in progress at Post Rejection Design.
Reuse has a long history in cloth, and it keeps proving that the smallest scraps can seed the biggest ideas. A thread barely long enough to pinch between two fingers can carry the colour that lights up a whole panel, along with the memory of the cloth it once belonged to.
The collection sits within the conversation around art for climate change, and it takes the idea literally. Waste is treated as a condition for repair, so sustainability lives in the construction of each panel and needs no slogan woven over the top. The question driving the work is a practical one: how can design respond to environmental change through the way things are made and what we decide is worth keeping?
Inside the studio at Post Rejection Design. Rescued yarns await future projects on the loom.
Behind it is Hanisha Thirth, founder of HA.THI, whose label began when she came across rural landfills in Southeast Asia heaped with fabric rolls discarded by weaving communities and small manufacturers. With a background in adaptive reuse architecture, she looks at cloth the way she might look at an old building: see what is already standing and find a new purpose for it. The label's guiding idea is punarjanm, or rebirth, and these panels give it a woven form.
In detail. Handwoven panels by Post Rejection Design, all created from rescued, post-production threads.
Rooted in Bhujodi's weaving traditions, the panels are made for interior and architectural spaces, where their restrained palette and intricate imagery reward a longer look. Rewoven: Skies and Waters has launched and is currently available for commissions, which means a wall somewhere can soon be home to a textile whose threads have already lived a full working life.
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Further Information:
Rewoven: Skies and Waters has launched and is currently available for commissions.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Turtle panel on the loom at the Post Rejection Design (PRD) studio.
All further images courtesy of Post Rejection Design (PRD)