•LYDIA DONOHUE•
Lydia merges craft, technology, and critical theory into speculative works shaped by smart textiles, ecological storytelling, and fibre-based traditions.
Where are you currently based?
Manchester, UK
How do you describe your work and practice?
My art practice engages with assemblage, both as a medium and also as a metaphor bound up in my doctoral work through writing, curating, and critically engaging with it as a dynamic, non-hierarchical concept that creates new meaning. One that gives space for the connection and inbetweeness of material, tool and technology. As an academic and an artist, I marry my research area with my practice, exploring smart textiles, future-oriented design and alternative applications of craftmaking practices and materials. In this future ground of hybridity in which materials meet the digital world, I shape images of a possible future.
(Lydia Donohue, Untitled, 2025, collage on paper, 8.3 x 11 inches)
What inspires your art/design process?
Artisans, artists and designers who work in the interdisciplinary space of smart design, environmental philosophy and ecological artmaking inspire my practice. Imagining new biofabrics and innovative integration of electronic media with analogue arts processes that develop discourses on how to fabricate possible futures.
(Lydia Donohue, Untitled, 2025, collage on paper, 8.3 x 11 inches)
In terms of materials and imagery, what do you typically acquire for your practice?
I am drawn to visuals of the post-Anthropocene, an imagined epoch of a world without humans. Hence, writing, photographs and storytelling associated with the nuclear industry, waste and toxicity, and the afterlives of radioactive materials influence my process of making.
(Lydia Donohue, Untitled, 2025, collage on paper, 8.3 x 11 inches)
Is there any artist/designer or artwork/object that has had a significant impact on your creative process?
Janice Jefferies, textile artist and academic. Leonora Carrington, surrealist painter. Also, the large unnamed lineage of fibre-based female artists whose work goes uncredited.
Do you have a repeated ritual/rhythm or strategy when it comes to your process of making?
Interruptions are important to me. Taking long breaks from making and switching to writing, then coming back to my practice, craving to shape something with my hands.
(Lydia Donohue, Untitled, 2025, collage on paper, 8.3 x 11 inches)
How do you see art/design changing in the near future?
I hope to see ‘craft’ that is currently relegated to the periphery of what is perceived as creative, meaningful and symbolic shift to be understood as a skilled, important and essential part of the art/design world.
(Lydia Donohue, Untitled, 2025, collage on paper, 8.3 x 11 inches)
Thank you Lydia! Check out her Instagram and website below.