Concept¶
She Who Holds the Ground¶
Before armour was metal, it was memory.
Before protection was hardness, it was holding.
She Who Holds the Ground is a matriarchal armour grown from the same systems that keep land intact, roots, fibres, moisture, mineral skins, and slow electrical rhythms. It does not defend against attack. It defends against disconnection.
This garment is inspired by the Irish landscape, not as an image or motif, but as a living system. It behaves like the land it references: growing, holding, responding, and remembering.
What Is It?¶
A wearable armour, built from field to fibre.
The root mantle, a structured shoulder piece, is grown from wheatgrass. Roots are cultivated directly into the shapes of each design, forming themselves around the forms rather than being cut or forced into them. The result is a living architecture: organic, precise, and unrepeatable.
The body of the garment is made from grass harvested from the field, then transformed into cloth using momigami, a traditional Japanese technique of working paper until it softens into a textile. Here, that process is applied to plant fibre, kneading and pressing the material until it yields a wearable cloth that holds the memory of every hand that worked it.
Roots grow, interlace, and grip.
Fibres weave and remember labour.
The land sets the rhythm.
The Making: From Field to Fibre¶
The process is the point.
Grass is harvested, dried, and worked by hand through a momigami method, a Japanese tradition of manipulating washi paper until it becomes supple enough to wear. Translated into plant fibre, this technique transforms raw grass into a cloth that is at once fragile and resilient, structural and yielding.
The root shoulder mantle begins as a design. Wheatgrass is then seeded and grown directly into that form, guided, not forced, over weeks. The roots find their way through and around the structure, interlacing as they would in soil. When the form is set, growth is arrested and the root system holds its shape.
Nothing is extracted. Everything is tended.
Why It Exists¶
In Irish tradition, land has long been understood not as passive ground or property, but as something that holds memory through use: labour, seasonal practice, famine, resilience, and continuity. Meaning emerges not through ownership, but through an ongoing relationship.
Contemporary relationships to land are largely mediated through systems of extraction, enclosure, and speed. Land is treated as background, something to be managed, optimised, or consumed, rather than as an active force that shapes bodies, cultures, and ways of knowing.
This shift is not accidental. Processes of colonisation, enclosure, and patriarchal governance systematically dismantled communal and cyclical systems of care. Knowledge held through bodily labour, seasonal rhythms, and women's leadership in land stewardship was displaced by abstract control and linear productivity.
Modern armour, technological, social, and emotional, often responds to these conditions by hardening the body. It protects through separation, insulation, and distance.
This work proposes another model: armour as rootedness. Armour as reconnection.
By working with living materials that require care, time, and restraint, the project rejects extractive design and instead adopts reciprocal making. The intention is not to dominate the material but to tend it. Growth, decay, and unpredictability are not controlled, they are accommodated.
The embedded electronic system does not amplify or dramatise the land. It listens, measures, and responds quietly — translating subtle bio-electrical variation into a slow pulse felt against the body.
Control is deliberately withheld.
The body does not command the system.
The land sets the rhythm.
Core Idea¶
Protection does not come from hardness alone.
It comes from connection, from anchoring, from the ability to feel what is beneath you.
She Who Holds the Ground reframes armour as a living system: one that remembers where it comes from, and asks the wearer to do the same.
Project Questions¶
- What happens to power, identity, and the body when we remember that the land shapes us, and that women once held that knowledge?
- What does protection look like when the threat is disconnection?
- How can the body relearn a relationship with land through material and form?
- What does matriarchal power look like when it is embodied rather than inherited?
- What does armour become when protection is defined as anchoring rather than hardening?
- What are the limits of working with living materials in wearable form?
Main inspirations¶
-
Zena Holloway
Exploring speculative plant-based materials and future biological systems. She works with grassroots to produce fashion and interiors. -
Diana Scherer
Growing plant roots into structured, textile-like forms. -
Paula Ulargui Escalona
Designing with living systems and biofabricated materials.
Main research papers: Seeds & Textiles¶
- Svenja Keune
Textile Farming — Seeds as a Material for Textile Design
Why this matters to my project:
Keune’s concept of textile farming reframes seeds as an active design material, aligning with my approach of growing textiles through biological processes rather than producing them through conventional manufacturing.
Living components¶
(generated by Chatgpt)
Other life beyond the armour?¶
If the armour is only one temporary role, what else can this living material become?
Post harvest¶
(generated by Chatgpt)
Growing conditions¶
(generated by Chatgpt)