With a strong focus on repurposing, Susan Cianciolo’s innate ability to bring meaning to neglected materials is transformative. This workshop opens up a conversation about our relationship to ‘waste’, recycling and sustainable mindsets within the creative practice, closely linked to healing modalities related to consciousness and ascension. 

Participants were guided through daily meditations and traditional Indian artisan techniques of repair work, weaving and natural dyeing to further communicate these ideas through experimental textile works related to fashion, home furnishings or more broadly, expressive tapestries; unlocking an awareness into how we can reframe our relationship to the materials we use in our daily lives, promoting creativity, beauty and innovation.

Covering techniques such as eco printing, kitchen waste dyeing, Ayurvedic dyeing, Rafoogari repair work, weaving on home made looms, Kantha stitch, drop spindle spinning and working with locally sourced fabric, scraps or preowned sentimental textiles.

Susan Cianciolo (b.1969) is a visual artist and designer living in Brooklyn, NY. 

She is a full time professor at Pratt Institute. Susan’s work is represented by Bridget Donahue Gallery in New York. 

Cianciolo founded her now-mythic, anti-establishment clothing line Run Collection in 1995-2001, a fashion line of hand crafted clothing made from found or recycled garments and textiles. Before upcycling or sustainability entered the cultural lexicon, in an era when fashion was ruled by minimalism and corporate mass production, she made the case for craft as couture, hand-making raw, one-off garments using found, recycled or altered textiles. Her process was communal; she formed a ragtag atelier of family members and other collaborators who worked in sewing circles, so that each frayed midi-dress or patchwork jacket was a product of collective intuition, adorned with layers of precious detailing and stitches by many hands. 

Her multi-disciplinary practice has explored numerous venues outside of the runway; including theater plays, musical productions, and video, publishing, community based projects, sculpture, installation and performance. 

Susan identifies as "a designer who also makes art, and a conceptual artist who occasionally designs clothes”. Her approach to making art hinges on precarity, messiness, and entropy. The artist insists on living without “systems or structures”.

Susan regularly hosts workshops focusing on textile work and incorporating healing modalities linked to meditation practices and natural medicinal plant materials.