About

Attend an exciting workshop that combines textile screen printing with Colorifix’s bacterial dyeing technology. This hands-on session is led by Ruth Lloyd, a Living Colour systems researcher, textile print designer and Colorifix creative resident.

Participants learn about how bacterial pigments pose sustainable alternatives to conventional petroleum dye systems, and how these pigments can be used in combination with traditional and innovative textile patterning processes. There is also an opportunity to physically engage with the process by screen printing with deactivated bacterially-pigmented printing pastes.

This experience aims to engage with the creative community and introduce biological colour systems to the public, communicating their creative potential both for industry and for individual designers and practitioners.

Colorifix is a UK-based biotechnology company that has pioneered the first entirely biological process to produce, deposit and fix pigments onto textiles. Using a synthetic biology approach, it offers a radically different solution to incumbent dyeing technologies that entirely cuts out the use of harsh chemicals and leads to huge reductions in water consumption. Colorifix engineers the colour in their lab and ships less than 5ml to client mills and dye houses, who they support to grow the pigments on-site via fermentation.

Colorifix is offering an alternative to synthetic dyes while meeting the industry’s key quality standards. They seek to copy nature’s own blueprints and via DNA sequencing, work out how nature encodes the instructions to make a pigment in living organisms. They then translate that message into their engineered microorganisms and grow colour, using fermentation techniques similar to producing beer. In doing so, they dramatically reduce the use of chemicals, water and energy. Colorifix is therefore working towards building a waste-free world and reducing fashion’s footprint.