Henrietta Dent

Six hand-woven sculptural strips that incorporate colourful thick silk wefts, suspended off copper pipes and fittings.

Henrietta Dent (b.1996) is a structural textile designer based in London who questions the value of overlooked materials.

During the final year of her BA at Manchester School of Art, she noticed waste yarn on the floor and began collecting other people’s leftover materials to weave with.

Awards:

Zoffany Visual Arts Award (2022)

BP x RCA, Sparkling Future Interior Car Cleaning runner-up (2022)

Priestman Goode x RCA, Re-thinking single-use plastic, Colour Material Finish design runner-up (2021)

Master Thesis awarded Distinction On a Closer Inspection: The Value of Craft (2021)

Exhibitions:

Atelier LK, No.43, London Fields (2021)

Priestman Goode, Rethinking Single-use Plastic, London Design Festival (2021)

Further Than the Eye Can See, Hackney Wick (2021)

Thrifted Palette

Thrift is defined as ‘the quality of using money and other resources carefully and not wastefully.’

How can we be more careful with leftover textiles?

How can we create thrifted palettes?

My experiences of beach and river clean-ups in Sri Lanka made me question attitudes toward waste, with a focus on the UK textile industry.

In search of a solution, I began finding the potential for leftover materials to live on in new ways, using my practice as a way of shining a light on their unseen potential.

In my project, Thrifted Palette, I sourced overlooked leftover materials from Gainsborough, a British silk mill, crafting and constructing their sculptural transformation through processing techniques on and off the loom.

The way I form the Palette of silk yarn hanks is inspired by pre-existing infrastructures, yarn architectural construction, and bricolage, focusing on the imperfections that can be celebrated in materials. This involves experimental material compositions that create a collaborative open dialogue with other design disciplines.

I hope to provide an intervention between textile waste and processes.

Portrait by https://www.bettyoxlademartin.com/