Folk Craft and Everyday Culture: From Plant to Fibre

Rachel Attfield is a cultural producer, writer, researcher and craft practitioner whose work explores everyday culture, making, memory and place. Her practice brings people together through making, conversation and shared experience, exploring how ordinary acts of creativity connect people to each other, to place and to the natural world. 

Her research and writing explore craft, embodied memory, everyday culture and natural material knowledge, with a particular interest in how practical skills, materials and shared traditions shape our relationships with place. Using natural and foraged materials gathered near her home in Hackney, Rachel creates workshops, installations and participatory projects that connect people, plants, labour, landscape and cultural memory. 

Alongside her independent practice, Rachel develops workshops and participatory programmes with Fun Palaces exploring everyday culture, cultural democracy and shared creativity, encouraging people to recognise culture as something created collectively through everyday life. 

Her recent work includes research into knots, cordage, basketry and plant-based making traditions, examining how everyday craft practices carry stories about work, home, ecology and place, and how these material relationships continue to shape culture, memory and shared ways of living.