Episode 13 - Rediscovering the Lost Art of Mending

In difficult times, people are often drawn to make and create with their hands. Throughout the pandemic, activities like baking bread, gardening, and sewing have resurfaced as small acts of resistance to a culture that celebrates overabundance and digital distraction, and as joyful acts that help to restore our mental health. Mending has been widely embraced as a practice that subverts throwaway culture while allowing people to slow down and repair clothing with their own hands. Mending and repair are also important parts of a thriving, circular fashion system that reduces consumption and waste, redesigns the whole textile industry to be waste-free and inclusive, and regenerates the natural world. 

Arounna Khounnoraj joins Reseed to discuss Visible Mending: Repair, Renew, Reuse the Clothes You Love, her book that guides readers how to mend, based on her experience as a fibre artist and force in the vibrant mending movement. Arounna is a Canadian artist and maker working in Toronto where she immigrated with her family from Laos at the age of four. She has a master’s degree in fine arts in sculpture and ceramics, and in 2002 she started bookhou, a multi-disciplinary studio with her husband John Booth, where Arounna explores screen printing and a variety of textile techniques such as embroidery and punch needle. In addition to being a sought-after mentor and educator, Arounna is the author of two books, with her third book on embroidery being released in spring 2022. 

Against a backdrop of pandemic, climate change, inequality, and war, mending can seem inconsequential and insufficient, and of course it cannot solve the many pressing crises we face. Mending, however, can be a powerful personal act that helps us to slow down, reduce consumption, and take care of our mental health so that we are more resilient and able to rise to looming problems. This conversation looks at reclaiming the joy of simple and slow homemade creativity in complex times.