tags:: #Australia #author #textiles
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Tricia is an artist, designer and educator in public art, wearables and cultural crafts. Having spent time across Australia, Germany and China, she is drawn to work in locations with fussy political and cultural statuses, working in harmony with the community and ecology to open pathways to challenge existing narratives and imagine alternative futures. Tricia sinks into the processes of crafts while paying attention to the high-low tech intersection of human/ post-human/ other-than-human, machine dialogue. Co-designing with organically generated data, she combines human design with inter-species and machine informed data, enabling an element of surprise in the outcome.
She created the wearable computer Blinklifier (2012) to amplify human blinking, and the installation BODYecology (2016) that utilizes craft as a record of sleep to generate bespoke blankets from sleeping participants. With long-term collaborations with Chinese craftspeople, her costume collection Cricket Songs (2016) pays homage to the cultural and craft practice of keeping crickets.
Her current projects are: Co-designing with horsetail embroiderers in Guizhou, China tracing the gestures of making with robotic colour sensing cameras; Mapping the ecological diversity of the Brigalow Belt in New South Wales, Australia with wearable cultural probes that communicate with trees. She works with a wide range of collaborators, including computer scientists, dance choreographers, chemical engineers, biologists and mechatronic researchers, and in her spare time she spins and weaves spiders silk.
She recommends the book Karen Barad (2007) *Meeting the Universe Half Way, Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meanin*g. You can find a full list of her creative work at [http://triciaflanagan.com/](http://triciaflanagan.com/)