“LET OUR TEXTILES TELL YOUR STORY”
“LET OUR TEXTILES TELL YOUR STORY”
Photo by Rennie Brown
Katherine Soucie is an award winning sustainable textile artist + fashion designer specialising in the transformation of textile industry waste. She studied Fashion Design in London and Toronto before furthering her studies in Textiles and Visual Art in Vancouver.
She was introduced to the world of textiles and fashion as a child, creating inventive outfits from hand me down clothing and vintage fabrics. Being the youngest of five children from a mixed cultural heritage (British, French Canadian/German/First Nations), textiles and clothing allowed for her to find her voice and express her cultural identity.
Her activism and participation in textiles/recycling began as a child after she participated in a program involved in the collection of waste in a provincial park but it was in the 1990’s while she was a design student that Soucie found herself on unexpected visits to massive landfills in Canada and the US. This had a profound impact on her creatively that led her to further her studies in Textiles in Vancouver after studying Fashion in London and Toronto, Canada.
In 2003, Soucie established her studio Sans Soucie Textile + Design, a zero waste upcycling design studio and clothing label. Translating from French as “worry free” or “without a care”, Sans Soucie as a term came to influence the studio’s design philosophy in that we should have be worrying about what is in our materials let alone how we wear them. It was while she was a textile student at Capilano University (2001-2003) that she established a material concept out of waste hosiery that would come to secure her development of a proprietary textile upcycling process for waste hosiery.
Her experimentation with textile industry waste over the years has resulted in an extensive body of work and is driven by a desire to integrate handcraft applications with industrial processes and digital technology to generate new forms of creative remanufacturing. The intention is to rediscover ways in which we can regenerate the practice of regional cultural textile production by working with what is already in existence. Allowing for a revival of craft skills to emerge through the performance of upcycling.
Soucie’s textiles, garments, accessories. sculptures and installations have been showcased throughout Canada, US, Japan, China, Australia and the UK. She is a recipient of the BC Creative Achievement Award, 2006 (Canada), shortlisted for the Niche Award 2007 (USA), recipient of the International Design Green Award for 2008 (USA) and shortlisted for the Sustainable Art and Design Competition 2014 (UK).
Ms. Soucie was the Visiting Artist/Lecturer in Textiles at the Welch School of Art and Design, Georgia State University (2013-2014), Program Director for Fashion at LaSalle College Vancouver (2017-2019) and is the MA Lecturer in Textiles and Sustainability at the University for the Creative Arts, UK She is currently based in London, UK and a PhD candidate at Kingston University London.
Katherine Soucie
Official Seal, British Columbia Creative Achievement Foundation Award
