LDF23: Mother Goddess of the Three Realms Celebrates British + Vietnamese Heritage (Design Milk)

Mother Goddess of the Three Realms: Cross Encounters, Joining Threads was the title of “a celebration of UK and Vietnam’s cross-cultural and shared design heritage” curated by WAX Atelier (London) in collaboration with Blue H’mong craftswomen of Po Co village (Mai Chau Province) and KILOMET109 (Hanoi) as part of both London Design Festival and Vietnam Design Week.

The same group collaborated on Mother Goddess Rope (top and above), which is made from collectively sourced hemp, linen, nettle, silk, and wild yam root and bound together in song and dance.

A film screening area featured theater curtains and a backdrop made from naturally fire-retardant hemp, wool, and bast by British textile brand Camira and a pink theater rope made from cotton and silk by Brian Turner Trimmings Ltd, commissioned especially for the occasion. Two films were shown – Domestic Spinner by Yibing Chen, which explored the connections between spinning and women’s identities, and Mother Goddess of the Three Realms by Rocio Chacon and Yesenia Thibault Picazo (co-founder of WAX Atelier), which gave the exhibition its title and follows three groups of women as they create a 20-meter-long braided rope as an offering to the Mother Goddess to represent heaven, water, and forest.

The Nine Lives Shoe by Jennifer Duong and Natasha Hicks is made from recycled rubber, cotton, and nylon 4-stranded braided Caliga. It was designed for the “urban explorer” during Walking the City – a free summer school program led by STORE Projects to address the social imbalance in the creative industries.

Aimee Betts is an embroidery and textile artist specializing in traditional forms of stitching, knotting, and fabric manipulation, which she translates into contemporary designs. For this exhibition, she was showing ash batons, crapped and overhand stitched with wax cotton cord, leather cord, jute cord, and ceramic coated cord as well as samples made from the same types of cord and soutache cord, brass, tassel mould, dowel, rope, and vintage linen, combining traditional stitches with ones she has conceived herself.

Designed and made by Nice Projects, the simply titled Bench is made from hemp rope and wood to provide visitors to the exhibition with a place to rest, “converge and commune.”

Rope in Action is a sculptural structure running through the space that uses ubiquitous hardware items to showcase the rope strung and knotted through space.

Studio Raw Origins showcased Hemp, Earth + Politics – a demonstration of UK hemp decomposition processes into yarn, fiber, nutritional protein, and hemp seed oil – a small selection of their ongoing research into the thousands of uses for this carbon sequestering, zero waste, soil regenerating crop.

A Study in Bamboo by artist and molecular scientist Cynthia Fan is made from bamboo harvested over the summer from a garden in the area of London where the exhibition took place and is one of a series of compositions that enable an opportunity to gather field notes about the plant’s strength.

Sanne Visser, better known for her ropes made from human hair, was running rope-making workshops throughout the exhibition to demonstrate the process and offer visitors the chance to try it for themselves. She also had a dog lead made from human hair on display – part of her ongoing project, The New Age of Trichology, that connects hairdressers with spinners to promote this regenerative, non-extractive material for rope-making.

WAX Atelier collaborated with Brian Turner Trimmings Ltd to repurpose rope used for the recent British royal wedding into a temple decoration simply named Temple Tassel.

The Bee Skep Hut by Lyson Marchessault, Jesse Beagle, and Hayatsu Architects comprises a coppiced chestnut frame and a hazel and corrugated hemp fiber roof, wattle and daubed with London clay, hemp, and sand.