Fabric of Campus Fibre Garden
This innovative community-focused project at UBC Vancouver will create a living lab fibre garden to produce local textiles in a vibrant outdoor research site on campus. The garden will support interactive sustainable textile and creative arts projects while also serving as a public community space that addresses climate resilience and decolonization.
(clickable thumbnails below)
Project Team
Faculty Lead: Germaine Koh, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory
Staff Lead: Simone Levy, Urban Design Planner, Campus + Community Planning
Co-lead: Renée Lussier, Landscape Architect, Campus + Community Planning
UBC Collaborators:
- SEEDS Sustainability Program
- Dr. Alex Tavasoli, Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
- Slow Fashion: Circular Textiles, Sustainable Fibre Research Cluster
- Local Cloth research group — Germaine Koh, Alex Tavasoli, Alexandra Peck, Nathan Pelletier, Eric Li, Qingshi Tu, Heather Trajano, with Cheryl Gladu (Thompson Rivers University) and community partners
- Roots on the Roof Student Club
- Museum of Anthropology at UBC — Native Youth and Indigenous Cultural Interpreter Programs
Community Partners:
- FLEET Mobile Artist Studios, operated by Other Sights for Artists’ Projects
- EartHand Gleaners
- Karla Sandwith
- Dr. Kathy Dunster, KPU (retired)
Community-focused project that connects public space and traditional fibre-making
The Fabric of Campus Fibre Garden is a living research site growing fibre and dye plants to produce super-local textiles, while creating a vibrant public space for student activity and an inspiring green space that furthers the university's vision for climate resilience. Also located in the garden is the FLEET Mobile Artist Studio, an initiative to create space for art and culture in public spaces.
Visibly placed at the entrance to campus and connecting to community life, the garden will be a hub for hands-on research projects addressing the pressing issue of sustainability in textiles and clothing, while creating interdisciplinary experiential learning and knowledge sharing in public space for the whole community There, large plots of flax will grow and be processed in community, with human-scaled machinery, within a research project aimed at fostering a regional flax-to-linen network.
Integrating agriculture practices with daily life and green places
The garden explores the potential to integrate local agricultural systems and native ecologies within our everyday lives and green spaces, furthering UBC’s work towards climate resilience and decolonization. Among the mostly native fibre plants will be culturally important plants traditionally used by Musqueam and other local Indigenous peoples to make textiles. This focus on regenerative, pre-colonial fibre traditions connects to multiple research groups, such as the Slow Fashion: Circular Textiles, Sustainable Fibre cluster on alternatives to the environmentally and socially damaging fast fashion industry, the Local Cloth research group working with community partners towards a regional textile common. It also advances UBC's efforts to foster restorative and resilient landscapes based on native ecology.
The garden invites interaction, with plants available in the meadow for what Robin Wall Kimmerer terms ‘honorable harvesting,’ as well as student-built public furniture and art, learning activities on sustainable textiles and community-based making, and a lively cultural and education program generated by the FLEET Mobile Studio. Students are integrally involved: as assistants in the garden; through graduate studies and undergrad courses focused on urban agriculture, public space and public art, textiles and making; via student clubs such as Roots on the Roof; and as a site for projects coordinated by SEEDS Sustainability Program.
Slow, local and community-based practices
The Fibre Garden will be a place to develop and apply innovative community-based approaches to both public space and sustainable fibre-making traditions. It tests ideas that slow, local and community-based production are vital modes for both community well-being and resilience. The hyper-local textiles and sustainable clothing made from plants grown on site will help imagine how supply chains could be reoriented towards local production, while reconnecting to traditional ecological knowledge.
Burgess, Rebecca with Courtney White. 2019. Fibershed. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Aldersey-Williams, Justine, director. 2025. Woman Grows Jeans film. Northern England Fibreshed.