Tambalan: Artists Talks - Dr Keireine Canavan and Artist Makiko Kita

Come and join us for an afternoon of talks and conversations with:

Dr Keireine Canavan: Ritual Cloth: Southeast Asian Tribal Customs and Traditions of Botanical Dyeing and Semiotic Coding

Artist Makiko Kita: Connecting Through Colour: Exploring the Language of “Blue” and Unravelling the Meanings Embedded in Heritage Patterns

Speakers:

Keireine Canavan PhD, MDes, MA RCA, BA Hons

As a textile researcher, natural dyer and educationalist, Keireine was Subject Head of Textiles at Cardiff Metropolitan University for over twenty-five years. She founded the Sustainable Growing Futures (SGF Wales) research group with botanical dye and fibre gardens at Cardiff School of Art & Design and has led the Sustainability Curriculum for the past decade.

Keireine trained as an ikat weaver and natural dyer under the auspices of Marianne Straub OBE, and after studying at The Royal College of Art, London, she presented her PhD research Dayak to Digital: Traditional Ikat for Contemporary Patterned Knitted Textiles (2003). Her thesis explores the semiotic coding of tribal ikat woven textiles and botanical dyeing methods in Southeast Asia and the Far East, with digital futures. Keireine lived in the Gulf States of the Arabian Peninsula specialising in the ancient craft of Bedouin al-Sadu weaving and embedded into the Bedouin women weaving community with over twenty years of study. As Research Fellow Al-Sadu Weaving Society, Kuwait, she worked with local museums, universities and weaving communities where she reintroduced lost regional botanical dyeing techniques and recording oral Bedouin histories for future preservation and knowledge.

Artist Makiko Kita (Maki)
Maki is an award-winning Japanese artist and peace promoter based in Wales, with academic roots at Central Saint Martins, Waseda University, Oxford University, and Kyoto University of the Arts. Having lived and worked globally, she infuses her community-led practice with a fluid worldview centred on social inclusion, nature, and peace advocacy.

Her practice uniquely combines linguistic anthropology with natural colour palettes, gathering pigments directly from the local landscape to explore how language shapes our view of nature. Through this research, she decodes how diverse tongues—including Malayo-Polynesian languages (such as Javanese, Malay, Indonesian, and Māori), Japanese, Welsh, English, and European languages—interact with the environment and connect us to one another. Maki's multidisciplinary work has been showcased widely, including the Liverpool Biennial and the Berlinale Film Festival.

These talks are part of the The Tambalan project which brings together artists from Wales and Indonesia alongside local communities to explore disability rights, identity, care work and social equality through the power of art, reflection and conversation.

The project’s name is inspired by the Javanese tambal motif- an historic batik pattern of triangles and geometric grids meaning “to patch” or “to mend” to promote healing and restoration.

This workshop is made possible by funding awarded by Postcode Community Trust and raised by Postcode Lottery players, the wider Tambalan project has been funded by the Arts Council Wales and Wales Arts International.