Artist bio
Fumika Tani is a Japanese textile artist and MA Textile Design candidate at Chelsea College of Arts, London (graduating 2025). Rooted in the philosophy of Mingei, her work reimagines the endangered Japanese weaving tradition of Kasuri through British wool and natural dyes sourced from food waste and plants. By bridging cultures and landscapes, she proposes that sustaining tradition means not replication, but relevance.
TSUGI Series
TSUGI—meaning “to join” or “to patch” in Japanese—draws on Yanagi Sōetsu’s Mingei philosophy to reimagine the fading Kasuri weaving tradition within a British context. Handwoven in British wool at kimono width and dyed with natural colours sourced from food waste and plants, the series maps a dialogue between landscapes, cultures, and histories.
Each piece embodies a meeting point: avocado pinks, wine reds, and woad blues shift across the threads, evoking seasons in transition. By integrating Japanese heritage with British materiality, TSUGI explores what it means to sustain tradition in a globalised world—proposing that preservation is not replication, but relevance.
The series ultimately gives voice to endangered crafts in transformation, offering textiles as bridges between past and future, place and identity, craft and sustainability.
This work reinterprets Kasuri (Japanese Ikat) through horizontal checks, merging Japanese and British textile histories. Its earthy pinks, drawn from food waste materials, reflect cycles of consumption and renewal. The reverse recalls British tweed, positioning the piece as a dialogue between sustainability, heritage, and contemporary identity.
Replacing indigo with the historically British dye woad, this piece employs both warp and weft Kasuri to form an Okina-gōshi grid on its reverse. Its shifting blues and yellows evoke landscapes and seasons in flux, mapping cultural and ecological interconnectedness. The work asks how endangered crafts can adapt and remain relevant across place and time.
Drawing from domestic British rituals of drinking, this textile transforms humble materials into a meditation on renewal. With muted wine-reds and soft herbal greens, the fractured Kasuri check evokes impermanence and continuity. Its reverse recalls British tweed, bridging Japanese weaving heritage with local identity in transition.
colours as regional identity
Natural dyes are not only materials, but carriers of place, memory, and belonging. In TSUGI, colour is drawn from food waste and plants rooted in the UK—avocado stones, coffee grounds, red wine, peppermint tea, woad, and weld. Each shade reflects regional rituals of consumption and cultivation, from domestic kitchens to historic fields of woad.
Through these colours, the textiles become more than surfaces: they embody landscapes and social habits, translating the everyday into a visual language of identity. By situating Japanese Kasuri within British chromatic traditions, the work proposes colour as a shared, regionally rooted dialogue that connects craft with ecology and cultural continuity.
About Me
I am a Japanese textile artist based in London, completing my MA in Textile Design at Chelsea College of Arts in 2025. My practice is guided by the belief that tradition is sustained not through replication, but through relevance.
Through the TSUGI series, I connect Japanese Kasuri weaving with British materials, local plants, and food-waste dyes—crafting textiles that embody transition between cultures, environments, and histories.
Recent achievements include the Woolmen’s Innovation Award 2025 and participation in the Ananas Anam Project, with upcoming exhibitions including a year-long display at Reed Smith’s London office.
Looking ahead, I aim to expand TSUGI into community-engaged projects, where weaving becomes both a vessel of heritage and a tool for reimagining sustainable futures.