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This article explores how creative expressions in the course Sloyd, Design, and Sustainable Development at Umeå University serve as a form of eco-cultural resilience. Eco-cultural resilience refers to a culture’s ability to preserve traditions and ecological practices despite environmental and social changes. The course encourages students to engage in activism and use craft as a tool for addressing climate change and social justice, aligning with the vision of "Design Futuring" by Fry. Two student projects are highlighted: The Butterfly Effect, which raises awareness about endangered species through embroidered butterfly brooches, and Dear Plastic, which transforms plastic waste into a christening gown to challenge perceptions of plastic waste. Both projects demonstrate how traditional craft techniques can inspire environmental action and shape public discourse on sustainability. At Umeå University, craft education combines traditional skills with innovation, empowering students to influence societal change and contribute to a more sustainable future.

Society is spinning out of control, moving at an accelerating pace. We rush to keep up, stress over rapidly changing fashion trends, and consume at unprecedented rates, only to discard items moments later. This thesis resists these trends and rejects the urge to follow the crowd.

Through a series of slow textile art and clothing projects, I explore the aesthetics of aversion. The process has been time-consuming, difficult, tangled, and at times boring. It has employed repetition and return as methods, using textiles and garments as materials, and drawing on emotions, memories, and habits as driving forces. These elements aim to forge new relationships with matter, people, and the Earth.

In everyday life, I seek to slow down the relentless push toward novelty. Rather than embracing the faster, easier path, these projects focus on the relational, tactile, and identity-building aspects of textiles and garment-wearing. My goal has been to resist solutions, to avoid quick fixes, and even to turn away from problems altogether. This thesis highlights and discusses many concepts related to the aesthetics of aversion.

The fifth international and interdisciplinary art methods school Living in the Landscape (LiLa) took place in 2024. This series of schools is organized by the University of Arctic’s thematic network Arctic Sustainable Art and Design (ASAD). This year (2024) we undertook our hybrid delivery of online collaboration with locally situated task activity in each country; coupled with intensive feldworking in situ in the hydro and ‘green’ energ yriverscapes of Finnish Lapland.

This collection of essays offers comment here on our Lila (2024) as a celebration of the fow of ideas, understandings and activity. Together we have shared – struggled, and we hope succeeded – to express our stillness, our currents, our ebbs, and drifts but so too cascades, eddies, and waves of artistic response. Powerfully Lila makes connections between us; and with our key local contributions from artists, curators and others we have been brought together: energised.

This article discusses workshops at Umeå University that explored clothing as a form of self-expression, focusing on identity, culture, and societal norms. Over four weeks, students examined personal and cultural identity, stereotypes, and the influence of mass-produced fashion. They selected garments to reflect their personalities, challenged norms through fashion photography, and engaged in discussions on clothing’s role in shaping identity and reinforcing culture. The workshops also addressed the commercialization of fashion, body sexualization, and industry power structures, emphasizing the importance of a safe space for critical reflection on clothing choices and societal expectations.

The artwork was collaboratively created by students, and youth in Greenland, Finland, Norway and Sweden. This exhibition shows young people’s engagement in art to create an environmental, social, and cultural self-portrait, Sustainable Portraits, which shows who I am (and we are) in history, in my locality, in my family, in my local community, in my environment. The focus is on “me” and “us” as active con- tributors to sustainability, the flow of life, and the living na- ture, portraits of connectedness and participation. The Sus- tainable Portraits showcases collaborative art of youth and local artists. In Greenland, the youth focus on connectedness to locality and people. In Finland, young participants reflect- ed on identity and life in the north and the other group fo- cused on contemporary versions of portraits as media art visioning sustainable futures. In Sweden, some students ex- plored identity via digital self-portraits, carefully selecting at- tire, attributes, and techniques to convey cultural narratives, while another group aimed to challenge fashion norms. In Norway, the focus was on engaging tourists in sustainabili- ty actions through a photography project. Put together, the exhibition displays engaging art that prompts reflection on sustainability through exploring new forms of portraits.

This sweater challenges our perception of green energy, questioning whether it truly lives up to its name. Inspired by a visit to Vuotso, where a dam disrupted the natural ecosystem, it highlights the unintended consequences of human intervention: blocked fish migration, lost livelihoods, and displaced communities. The sweater is knitted using Hönsestrikk, a free-form knitting style that emerged in 1970s Denmark, characterised by vibrant borders and infused with personal and political messages. The message is simple but urgent: if we overuse resources and energy, the world faces irreversible damage.

This Tilde publication is the first from the Department of Creative Studies to focus on artistic research by gathering together our past, ongoing as well as future artistic research processes. The intention is to showcase the position we are currently in as a department navigating the field of artistic research. The theme of the publication is processes. The starting point is that we must be patient. We cannot rush such a process. Still, challenges need to be met with actions. In so doing, questions arise. We stumble, we fall, we rise, analyse, and move forward. We believe that we learn through experience, which is not linear. Sometimes, we learn from actions in the past. Other times, we learn in the moment of creating. An artistic action will trigger a reflective reaction. An artistic failure may be a research breakthrough. We believe that the artistic actions, the doing, the process of practising our art is the key parameter for feeding an artistic research process. Namely, the artistic activity must be embraced and the skills and knowledge embodied by the artist seen as a tool in the research activity. There is a long tradition at the Department of Creative Studies of conducting research within educational science in visual art, crafts/sloyd and music. Accordingly, our previous educational research has often included interdisciplinary approaches to our art subjects. In recent years, artistic research has grown in importance at the department. Besides the aim of artistic research to generate new knowledge to an artistic practice, it holds the potential to add new insights to the educational scientific field regarding practical, embodied and tacit knowledge, and new understandings of aesthetic activities and experiences.

In fashion, repetition is linked to imitation: we see how our friends, partners, and people on social media are dressed, and we want to look the same. This has created endless loops of trends, wherein we constantly strive for the new. This striving has created both environmental and ethical problems in the manufacture and distribution of garments. By repeatedly knitting and reknitting a sweater, I want to explore time and temporality in making and wearing clothes. When we consciously repeat or return there is the possibility to pay attention to our behaviour in relation to consumption and how we spend our time, wear our clothes, and relate to the natural world.

This text is a rewriting of the artistic research project Seven Shirts included in the licentiate dissertation Repetition Recur¬rence Return (Lundstedt 2021). In this text, I further describe the exploration of the project in which seven slowly made shirts were worn for 49 days as an everyday performance, to not get lost in the interesting and new, but to force the clothes to be kept in active use.

The article and project explore the experience of time when making seven shirts by hand to put attention to the accelerating speed of fashion and expand the definition of the concept of Slow in fashion design. Handling waste as well as using natural dye in the process has been important to explore imperfection as a design possibility and then challenge the way we look at garments and fashion that often has a sterile and spotless expression. 

Wearing has been a part of the process and was intended to be slow and like a ritual with the expectation of creating a relationship with each garment. The purpose of wearing the same kind of garment for 49 days in a row was about paying attention to something, time and adaptation. There is a stigma around how often one can use the same garment which means that being able to wear the same item this many times requires strength. The social aspects of wearing were sometimes hard to challenge and thus wearing each of the seven shirts for seven days had to be performed. The time spent with the shirts by making and wearing them created a relationship and together with active noticing I could embrace boredom and that created new meanings and relief.

Detta verk handlar om att virka, och förflytta en kropp genom ett landskap, upp på ett berg. Människan är som ett flockdjur, vi går i varandras fotspår, dit någon annan har gått tidigare. Men vart vi är på väg? Om den vi följer har lett oss in på en farlig stig som kan leda till förstörelse, kan vi då gå åt ett annat håll? Jag skapar min egen väg att följa, men jag är inte ensam, mina förfäder har gått här förut, djur och insekter är närvarande, ekorren, spillkråkan, myran och humlorna. Varje maska, mina fötter, mitt sinne och mina minnen visar vägen. Virkningen bestämmer hastigheten, mina rörelser måste sakta ner. Varje gång jag kommer tillbaka, följer jag den virkade stigen för att börja där jag slutade. Att lämna garn bakom sig kan vara ett löfte om återvändande. När jag lämnat stigen och berget finns det rester av mina rörelser kvar i landskapet. Jag tar med mig växter, blad och svampar ner från berget för att färga ullen. I ullen finns spår av berget. Vilken väg leder till överlevnad? Den främmande och förändringens väg? När stigen har nått sitt slut tar jag den med mig och bär in den i ett galleri vid foten av berget. När stigen blir till ett nystan tappar den sin tid, den blir en hågkomst av en händelse, men pågår inte längre.