Episode 10: Threading Ancestral Knowledge

In this episode of the Therapeutic Landscapes podcast, Rebecca speaks with Becky Dodman Wainwright, Postgraduate Course Leader for AUP and textile researcher/artist, whose work explores Colombian heritage crafts, ethical research methods, and the repair of lost mixed-heritage connections.

The conversation begins with Becky’s own creative and ancestral journey, tracing how a lifelong relationship with colour, textiles, making, and family history led her towards a deeper exploration of her Colombian heritage. What began as an inquiry into colour and identity opened into a much larger process of reconnection, as Becky began researching Indigenous Colombian textile traditions and the knowledge held within woven forms.

At the centre of the episode is Chumbe weaving, a textile practice connected to Indigenous communities across parts of South America. Becky reflects on the Chumbe belt as far more than a beautiful object. Through pictograms, woven structures, symbols, and inherited making practices, the belt can hold cosmologies, community knowledge, place-based memory, ancestral instruction, and women-to-women knowledge transfer.

The episode also explores the ethical questions that come up when working with heritage craft, Indigenous communities, and ancestral knowledge. Becky speaks about the importance of care, reciprocity, active listening, long-term relationship building, community permission, and land permission. Rather than approaching research as extraction, she describes a slower and more relational way of working, one that begins with respect for the people, places, materials, languages, and histories involved.

A powerful thread running through the conversation is the idea that textiles can act as living archives. They are not just objects to be studied, displayed, or reproduced, but carriers of meaning that must remain connected to their context. For Becky, this means ensuring that stories, names, places, permissions, and relationships stay wrapped around the work, rather than allowing visual symbols to be separated from the communities and landscapes that hold them.

Rebecca and Becky also discuss how these ideas shape teaching and research practice, including ways of encouraging students to think beyond conventional research frameworks and towards more relational, ancestral, future-facing, and earth-centred approaches.

This is a conversation about making with care.

Care for ancestors.
Care for community.
Care for land.
Care for symbols.
Care for the stories carried through hands, threads, colours, and woven forms.

It is an episode about textile practice as embodied knowledge, research as relationship, and the possibility of reconnecting with heritage through care and deep listening.

Bio

Becky Dodman Wainwright is an experienced textile artist, weaver, and academic with 13 years of experience, currently serving as the Postgraduate Course Leader at Arts University Plymouth. Her practice is built on an "Othered" aesthetic derived from her mixed British, Chinese, and Colombian ancestry, specifically the Altiplano Cundiboyacense and Andean Indigenous heritage. Committed to decolonial research, she focuses on transforming personal experiences of severed heritage into rigorous, reciprocal methodologies. With 15 years of community work experience, her work explores the intersection of ritual, textile languages (such as Wayuu kaanás and Inga labores), and socially engaged practice.

Links

Website: www.beckydodman.work

Instagram: @becky.dodman.wainwright