Cover Anabel Poh is a textile specialist, artist, designer, and innovator based in Eindhoven in the Netherlands (Photo: Pais Agency)
Anabel Poh is a textile specialist, artist, designer, and innovator based in Eindhoven in the Netherlands (Photo: Pais Agency)
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Textile specialist, artist, designer, and innovator Anabel Poh is doing what she can to make the textile industry more sustainable
Anabel Poh wears so many hats—entrepreneur, artist, student, scientist—that it is hard to describe what she does in one sentence. What we can safely say, however, is that she is a self‑professed “textile nerd”, so much so that she has centred her entire career around it, from fibre-based fabrics to newfangled innovations. Working within the field of sustainable material innovation, Poh is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Uncolour Studios, where she is developing biodegradable and bio-based silk printing inks. As a material developer at The New Materialist, she is also working on a biodegradable and bio-based coating derived from agricultural byproducts.
But Poh issues a caveat about her work: “I don’t believe that there is a sustainable material.” This may perhaps be the greatest irony of her work, but what she is poking at is that there are so many steps in the industrial process that it makes a “sustainable” material no longer recyclable or biodegradable, for instance. “Not everything that is natural is sustainable. Not everything that is bio-based is biodegradable.”
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Above Anabel Poh is a textile specialist, artist, designer, and innovator based in Eindhoven in the Netherlands (Photo: Pais Agency)
Anabel Poh is a textile specialist, artist, designer, and innovator based in Eindhoven in the Netherlands (Photo: Pais Agency)
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With so much miscommunication about what actually is “sustainable”, what she looks out for, instead, is the effort towards sustainability—which involves the entire textile industry. It is a massive task, but the Singaporean is just getting started in her corner of the world in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, where she is based.
Poh traces her love of textiles back to her Peranakan heritage. “Batik was always a big centrepiece in a lot of family traditions. There’s a lot of attention to detail in the beading, and the way the patterns have been drawn,” she explains. It was only much later when she went to the Design Academy Eindhoven for her bachelor’s degree in industrial and product design that she discovered not only the expressive power of fashion, but also its incredibly polluting nature. “There was a realisation [as to] why is it that the thing that makes you feel so good is so bad for the environment?” she says. “I wanted to understand why this beautiful thing can be so detrimental.”
Above Ink tests for Uncolour Studio, printed on large-scale textiles at Lottozero textile lab in Prato, Italy (Photo: Alessandro Destro)
Ink tests for Uncolour Studio, printed on large-scale textiles at Lottozero textile lab in Prato, Italy (Photo: Alessandro Destro)
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Poh’s foray into sustainable material innovation was not always the plan. At one point, the School of the Arts, Singapore alumna seemed set on being an artist and designer. Her graduation installation Meaningful Deconstruction was created with deconstructed and reconstructed silk scarves from Petit H, provided by French luxury house Hermès from materials its métiers had no use for. But as sustainability became intertwined with many of her works, Poh realised that she was limiting herself if she just did art and design. “What I wanted to do required a lot more knowledge that I did not have, and a lot of skill sets that I did not have,” she says.
While at the Design Academy, Poh noticed that the common practice of screen printing “requires the washing of [synthetic] ink that goes into the water streams, which has a lot of microplastics in it”. She explains, “I was wondering, why there wasn’t an ink option that could be beneficial to the screen printing industry.” This became the catalyst for the founding of Uncolour Studios, a start-up trying to make and scale bio-based and biodegradable ink—a move that firmly planted Poh’s work at the intersection of design and science.
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“The jump was huge,” Poh says. Both she and co-founder Sarah Roseman had no background in chemistry to back them up. But with the aid of an online cosmetic course, Poh and her team are developing formulas for inks made with natural pigments concocted from ingredients such as marigold flowers. Poh is also simultaneously doing her masters at Saxion University of Applied Sciences in innovative textile development, which has given her the scientific basis to synthesise current research, speak with chemists and manufacturers, and come up with new materials.
She is glad for the broad nature of her masters programme. “That’s really important, because what’s happening in the textile industry is that different people are working with each other, but don’t understand how to communicate with each other,” she says. If the people in charge of recycling technologies are not indicating to designers what fabrics can be recycled, for instance, there is little hope of creating “closed loop” systems of recycling, thus generating more waste.
Implementation of new technology is another issue, Poh says. “The technology is all out there, but the textile industry is very old and quite stuck to the machines and materials that it’s used to.” The industry needs people who understand how to tie “all these moving parts together”—someone she hopes to be.
“At the end of the day, it’s very simple—it’s the care that I have,” she says when we question why sustainability is so important to her. “The climate issue is very connected to inequality. The point where they intersect—that is why I do what I do.” Poh says she wants to do what she can with her expertise, such that “it can ripple out into an outcome useful for the people and the environment”. She expounds, “I want to have kids. We all exist on our planet. And if we don’t do our part to make a difference, then our kids will not be able to survive on this planet.”
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Ethan Kan was Tatler Singapore’s dining writer.
