artist
statement
I am a Los Angeles-based researcher and social practice artist working in the spaces between culture, material, and possibility. Through personal insight, research-as-creation, and writing, I explore the tentacular connections between craft, industry, and academia and create space for new possibilities to emerge.
Inspired by the concept of social sculpture, I instigate gatherings that enliven our capacity to imagine new paradigms, recognize our agency, and exercise enchantment. My practice weaves ontological reimagining, systems thinking, and embodied ways of knowing toward the creation of future imaginaries. I reveal what lies hidden or unexamined, encouraging a deeper understanding of the materials and systems that define our lives and worlds.
I have developed an interdisciplinary community of practice, convening textile artists and craftspeople, academics, architects, authors, fashion designers, activists, and industry professionals around regenerative design as a practical discipline and the poetry of flourishing. These happenings interpret material ecology, material and the mind, and local ecosystems and economies through the lens of regenerative design. I explore my interests through two complementary structures: Material Encounters communicates emerging visions of a regenerative and more-than-human future through research, exhibition, symposia, writing, and tactile experiments, while Southern California Fibershed engages directly with ecological systems through fiber production, textile skill-building, community organizing, and carbon farm planning. These practices inform and amplify each other, bridging the separation between self and place, community and land.
I am currently researching place-based forms of craft and ecology as alternative ways of knowing and belonging. My Master's thesis, a Haptic Atlas of the Material and Sensuous Bioregion, addresses how we might live well in a world in rupture. The Atlas maps other ontologies through a curriculum, a carrier bag, and a series of material artefacts, each a fluid becoming that points to dogged hope and ongoingness. Another project, Becoming Place, looks at wayfinding as a creative response and a method of exploring the generative potentialities threading together arts- and ecology-based practice, place, and knowledge creation. My home studio-garden serves as an experimental ground and observation landscape for urban biodiversity encounters and local resilience.
Ideas that have the potential to transform the quality of our future lives need champions and fellow travelers. My work extends the spaces where we discuss, critique, and explore material's urgent cultural, ecological, and social impacts, nurturing regenerative practice as an emergent strategy for building more livable futures.
bio
Lesley Roberts is a Los Angeles-based strategist, social practice artist, and independent researcher, linking regenerative practice, community resilience, and craft-based learning to create new paradigms, nurture agency, and encourage enchantment in a rupturing world. She explores the narrative and ecological potential of materials and uses design thinking to spark public engagement with critical ecological challenges. Through practice-based research that merges speculative inquiry with embodied making, she creates gatherings, installations, and workshops where materials act as agents that reshape our understanding of the world.
Her long-term inquiry merging craft, local fiber cultivation, and storytelling examines the co-production of material culture between human and more than human worlds. She is interested in how we move from awareness into applied practice, how we step beyond naming and mapping to explore what remains hidden or not yet articulated. Her social practice fosters creativity and its innate connection to the natural world, weaving together textile craft, grassroots organizing, alternative economic systems, and a cross disciplinary approach to art, cultural discourse, and regenerative design. She produces symposia on textile art, craft, and local production; initiates and produces talks and studio tours with artists, authors, architects, activists, and academics; and co-creates workshops that explore hand-mind relationships. Lesley's curatorial projects include Sympoiesis: making with, which explored how clothing has shaped our relationship to the land, our bodies, and each other, and Tricksters & Transformation, which explored shape-shifting and alternative world-making in textiles.
She has been invited to speak on material innovation, regenerative textile systems, and the creative economy for cultural institutions and universities, as well as for numerous community groups throughout Southern California. She recently presented on speculative fiber futures at Textile Society of America's 2024 Symposium, Shifts and Strands, and the ecologies of hope at By Design and By Disaster for the Free University at Bozen-Bolzano. Lesley is enrolled in the MA Regenerative Design program at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, expected June 2026. She holds a BA in Art History from UCLA's School of the Arts, a certificate from UCLA Anderson's Executive Education program, and is a certified Carbon Farm Planner and Regenerative Agriculture Technical Assistance Provider (CSU Chico and the Carbon Cycle Institute)
Material Encounters is a creative research practice that seeks to deepen our collective understanding of place based thriving. I share this intention with a community of artists, creatives, architects, designers, scholars, philosophers, craftspeople, environmentalists, makers, curators, mavericks, and the curious–anyone who works and plays with material. The emphasis is on the transformative dialogues between material, hand, and mind, regenerative and innovative material systems, and local ecosystems-biodiversity.
My intent is to cultivate critical dialogue, facilitate access to the breadth of material knowledge and resources, and engage in research, creation, and exhibition,
I write these words from the ancestral, traditional, and unceded lands of the Tongva Gabrieleno peoples.