Jessie Von Curry: Material World Festival at Kew Gardens

Jessie Von Curry has been working with unconventional materials for years: mycelium, seaweed, and textile waste, turning them into sculptures, costumes, and installations that question how we make things. We've featured her work, Plantspeak, before, drawn to how she uses raw, natural, and sometimes living materials to communicate complex ideas about our relationship with the natural world, much like we do in our own practice with our products formulated with seaweed extracts. 

When Jessie invited us to see her latest project at the Material World festival at Kew Gardens, we knew we had to share what she'd created. Flourishing the Night consisted of three sculptural costumes worn across 13 performances in Kew's Temperate House, with performers Zara Sands and Aaron Baksh bringing each piece to life.

Rather than presenting these costumes as static objects, Jessie structured them as a journey through time, each one addressing a different moment in our relationship with the natural world. Together, they form a narrative about extraction, consequence, and possibility.

The Corpse Lily looks at the past and present, referencing the Rafflesia, a parasitic plant that extracts its resources from a host plant and lures insects with promises of sweetness. It's a direct metaphor for extractive industrial practices: take what you need, leave the damage behind.

If the Corpse Lily represents how we've been operating, Waste Mountain confronts us with the consequences. Made from textile waste, it makes visible the material reality we're currently creating. The UK alone sends 350,000 tonnes of clothing to landfill annually. This costume doesn't symbolise that waste, it's literally built from it.

Against this backdrop of extraction and accumulation, Plantspeak offers a different trajectory. Looking at potential futures, it imagines what communication between species might look like if we developed the capacity to interpret botanical signals. Plants already communicate through chemical compounds, root networks, and symbiotic relationships with fungi. The costume explores what happens when you treat these exchanges as language rather than a biological mechanism.

Across all three costumes, the performances use the body as a site for thinking through our material relationships with other organisms. Watching them in Kew's Temperate House, we were reminded of why we started working with seaweed in the first place: not just as an ingredient, but as a teacher in how to work with living systems rather than against them.

As we transition into Dulcie, this connection feels particularly resonant. Jessie's work demonstrates what happens when you let materials guide the conversation, when you build practices around regeneration. It's a principle we've carried from our earliest formulations with dulse, kelp, and bladderwrack.

References: Jessie Von Curry
Photographer: Lucho Davila