Mia Karren is a textile designer and integrative maker who recently graduated from the Textile Design BA at Central Saint Martins, with a specialisation in weave. Her work considers new approaches to spaces and novel applications for textile within them. Rooted in sustainable practice and responding to emergent reshuffling of consumer priorities, her work interrogates modern attitudes towards consumption, and explores how we choose to codify our objects, practices, and customs. How is impedimentum observed and recollected? How does it reverberate in our collective and personal memories? How can we restructure our relationships to goods and materials?

Through internships with multidisciplinary artists and designers—the Fabrick Lab in Hong Kong, and Kiki van Eijk, and Claudy Jongstra in the Netherlands—her practice has been further rooted in sustainable materials, technology integrated with craft, and an ability to situate textile in many divergent contexts.

In her graduate collection, Mia considers how base fibres of textile transform into a means of finding places of refuge and establishing shelter during a crisis. Guided by earlier research observing silkworms spinning their threads for cocoons, and considering the parallel to the weaver at the loom, ‘Your Place in the Family of Things’ explores how humans and nature are intertwined in mythology, especially as pertaining to transformation, change, ritual, and chaos. The work searches for cohesion between maker and material origins, examining notions of memory and entropy while seeing craft reduced to its most primitive.