In this episode, Rebecca speaks with Becky Dodman Wainwright, Postgraduate Course Leader for Arts University Plymouth (AUP) and textile researcher/artist, whose work explores ethical research methods, Colombian heritage crafts, and the repair of lost mixed-heritage connections.

Together, they discuss Becky’s personal and creative journey into Colombian textile heritage, including how questions of colour, ancestry, family history, and Indigenous Colombian identity led her towards the study of chumbe weaving and the symbolic knowledge held within woven belts.

Becky reflects on the importance of approaching heritage craft through care, reciprocity, relationship, and consent, especially when working with Indigenous communities, land-based knowledge, and ancestral practices. The conversation explores what ethical research can look like when it moves beyond individual consent and begins to consider community permission, land permission, active listening, and long-term relationship building.

The episode also explores textile practice as embodied knowledge, the role of pictograms and woven symbols as forms of cultural memory, and the need to keep context wrapped around the objects we study, make, exhibit, and teach.

This is a conversation about textiles as living archives, ancestral reconnection, community knowledge transfer, decolonial research practice, and the power of making with care.

Links:

Website: www.beckydodman.work

Instagram: @becky.dodman.wainwright

Therapeutic Landscapes: www.therapeutic-landscapes.org