Beth Williams is a queer, disabled designer and multi-disciplinary artist based in Crawley, West Sussex. Who specialises in Living Textiles, biodesign and knitwear. Their practice centres around their experience of an inaccessible world, as well as the relationship between human and environmental sustainability. Their living textiles and garments grow alongside them. They collaborate to raise questions about the lifespan of clothing, and ask their audience to consider what happens at the end of a garment’s use by presenting an alternative afterlife through their living garments.
Beth Williams is a Resident Artist at Unit 79/80 County Mall.
For this new Window Gallery installation Beth has created a posable soft sculpture made with kelp and bladderwrack bio “leather”, aluminium wire, seacell rope, crocheted wool and cotton. Nereocystis luetkeana, bull kelp, made with homegrown indigo dyed kelp bio“leather”, with dried bladder wrack is used to create the root like holdfast that anchors it to the substrate.
Beth explores the use of seaweed in new, innovative materials, both it terms of its properties and its sustainability, as well as it’s different histories and cultural significances around the world. Using edible kelps, grown in Ireland, to create the leather like material is a nod to the consumption of seaweed being a life line to Irish people during the Great Famine and dyeing the materials with Japanese Indigo connects to it’s use a tax during the Asuka period in Japan, as well as it’s importance in Japanese Shinto tradition.
All seaweed sourced from sustainable Irish seaweed farmers.
Beth William’s artwork will be displayed in the Window Gallery at Unit 79/80, County Mall Shopping Centre from September-December 2026.
Opening hours are:
Monday to Saturday: 9am – 6pm
Sunday: 10.30am – 4.30pm
