Threads Of The Future

Textile specialist, artist, designer, and innovator Anabel Poh is doing what she can to make the textile industry more sustainable

- Ethan Kan

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 CEO 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.” 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.