Soft Armour

Overview

Overview

Create your own textile amulet embedded with dried medicinal and symbolic plants in this hands-on workshop. Using repurposed fabrics and dried plant matter, you'll craft a personal amulet that represents your vision of meaningful support and care.

This workshop explores:

• Translating your support needs into symbolic designs
• Learning basic hand-sewing techniques
• Creating plant combinations with healing properties
• Developing personal systems of care through craft

You'll leave with a finished textile amulet that embodies your reflections on community, resources, and self-care practices needed for sustained wellbeing.

All sewing experience levels welcome! Materials provided.

Engaging with the broader themes of the Gathering programme, participants will create designs that emerge from considering student support needs, what meaningful support looks/ feels like, what resources, systems of care, routines and communities are needed to sustain them. These designs will be translated into personal textiles patches stuffed with corresponding combinations of the plants.

Event Location:

This event will take place at our exhibition and event space, 'Gathering' in The Bomb Factory in High Holborn.

Address: The Bomb Factory Holborn, 99 Kingsway, WC2B 6QX

Access:

We are offering all attendees a reimbursement for travel costs to the event. More information will follow, but please keep a copy of any travel receipts/payments used to attend this workshop.

- The venue has step-free access.

- The closest toilet is an accessible public toilet; a visual guide to its location will be available at the venue.

If you have any questions about this event or accessibility needs, please email: artsprogramme@su.arts.ac.uk

Artist Bio - Ella Yolande

Tangled in thoughts about the vegetal, wildness, seeds and our messy, multi-species bodies, Ella Yolande’s practice is informed by queer ecologies, ideas of resilience, preservation and the more-than-human. She works across video, 3D animation, sculpture and textiles with references to fieldwork, botanical architecture and protective wear. Through considering the history and medicinal properties of plants, as well as the need for mutual flourishing and rethinking the human body as individual, she explores ways that multiple knowledge forms might weave possible ecologies of sensitivity.

Ella is currently based in London studying a masters in Art and Ecology. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Pilot Ima, Riga; Mega Art Fair, Milan; Skaftfell, Seyðisfjörður; Melkweg Expo, Amsterdam; Artcore Gallery, Derby; with screenings including the Coventry Biennial 2024, Videoity’s Utopia Today 2024 and Fiber Festival 2021. In 2023 she was a participant of LungA School, CCA Derry~Londonderry’s digital artist in residence and recently had a solo exhibition in Nunhead Cemetery Chapel, London.

ellayolande.co.uk

instagram.com/ellayolande