SELECTS02
Alice Potts
Materials innovator
Covid brought a particular problem for Alice Potts. The materials innovator uses sweat as the main ingredient in her work. As part of her Womenswear MA at the Royal College of Art, she worked with scientists at Imperial College to research a way of ‘growing’ our own accessories from sweat, which she demonstrated as rather beautiful crystals on ballet shoes, underwear and sportswear. Potts, 28, even grew crystals from her own urine.

Just before lockdown, she had collaborated with Matthew Needham on his final MA collection at Central Saint Martins to create a ‘tearing’ – an earring made from one of the designer’s tears. But the obsession with bodily fluids had to stop in the face of the pandemic. Potts wasn’t clear if the virus could be carried in sweat; ‘I didn’t want to risk it’.

When lockdown hit, she was in Athens finishing up her residency at the Onassis Foundation where she had continued her sweaty experiments, working with a team  of women cyclists whose sweat she would methodically harvest after their training sessions. She managed to get the last flight back to the UK so she could isolate with her parents at home in Cambridge. Her work projects quickly ground to a halt, so instead she decided to throw her considerable energies into doing something new, like finding an alternative to plastic. ‘Bioplastic is a material that is made wholly from biological material such as algae or seaweed,’ she says.
She started to experiment in the kitchen extracting natural dyes from plants foraged within a 2km radius on her daily exercise walks and joined some lockdown groups on Facebook to ask anyone living near the coast to send her seaweed. ‘I asked, “Can you bag it up, and I’ll pay for postage.”’ Parcels of seaweed from complete strangers started to arrive, which she was able to dry and make into a powder as the basis for sheets of multicoloured bioplastic. One of her favourite ingredients is red cabbage, a vegetable she had previously used to dye her sweat crystals shades of delicious blues and deep purples.

She cuts up the sheets of bioplastic using a cookie
cutter technique to make curled ‘sequins’ that look
like petals from an exotic flower, and she is in the
process of building her own biomaterials library to
share her work and find collaborations.

‘There’s been such a focus on sustainable materials
always being beige. There are so many wonderful colours that can be developed. My whole goal was on showing the potential variations of colours – you can go into nature and pick your own.’ TB alicepotts.com
WORDS TAMSIN BLANCHARD | PHOTOGRAPH EDD HORDER