rootfull guides living plant roots into bio-textiles for a circular future

design that begins beneath the surface

Rootfull grows lighting, textiles, sculpture, and material studies from plant roots, bringing an underground system of growth into the space of design.

Founded by artist and photographer Zena Holloway, the London-based bio-design studio guides roots through hand-carved beeswax templates, allowing the material to form through time, water, and living movement. What arrives is a biomaterial with the delicacy of lace and the firmness of a crafted surface, shaped by a process that asks for patience before it asks for production.

The work feels especially attuned to a moment when design is being asked to slow down and listen harder. Rootfull does this through a material language that is grown from seed, guided by hand, and allowed to carry the irregular intelligence of the plant. Each lamp, wall piece, and textile surface reveals the path of roots as they search, bind, thicken, and hold. The studio sets the conditions, then lets biology complete the surface.

Material Ecologies, Rooted, Lowestoft Beach, First Light Festival, June 2025. image © Rootfull

from underwater to underground

Holloway came to Rootfull after more than twenty-five years as a self-taught underwater photographer, a background that still moves through the forms she makes today. Many pieces carry traces of coral, jellyfish, and marine fans, with porous edges and pale filaments that recall life shaped by currents.

Her shift from image-making to biomaterials began in 2018, after years of witnessing the scale of plastic pollution in the ocean. She first explored mycelium, then turned toward plant root as a medium with its own structural behavior.

That biography gives the work its emotional charge without pushing it into sentiment. Rootfull design grows from concern, yet it stays close to technique. Holloway carves wax, sows seed, monitors moisture, and harvests the root structure after growth has done its work. In some projects, wheatgrass grows for around twelve days as the shoots rise above and the roots bind below into a naturally woven textile.

bio-material (detail), Rootfull. image © Rootfull

guiding growth into light

The Swell Light is one of Rootfull’s clearest translations of this process into an interior object. Its surface is made from a fossil-like lattice of plant roots, cultivated into a coralline form that filters light through small gaps and fibrous seams. The piece reads as both lamp and material study, with illumination passing through a surface that was once actively growing.

Across the studio’s standing lamps, roots become visible as structural lines. They gather into shades and vertical forms with a softness that comes from their origin, yet the objects hold their shape with surprising confidence. Rootfull treats light as a way to make the hidden labor of plants legible. The glow does more than decorate the surface. It reveals how root can behave as textile, diffuser, and frame.

Swell light sculpture, Rootfull. image © Rootfull

wall pieces as grown drawings

The wall works bring the process closer to drawing and textile. Root-grown surfaces stretch across panels in fine webs, with loose edges and small variations that give each piece its own grain. Some are grown with hessian yarn, others are dyed with natural pigments such as gallnut, turning the root material into a soft field of line and tone.

This is where Rootfull’s design language becomes especially architectural. The pieces read like studies of support systems, with every strand contributing to the whole surface. They suggest a way of thinking about structure through touch and accumulation, where strength comes from many small connections working together.

Living Inlay, Rootfull, 2025. image © Rootfull

furniture, wool, and circular interiors

fullSPRING, Rootfull’s collaboration with Delyth Fetherston-Dilke, expands the studio’s research from collectible objects into furniture materials. The project explores how plant roots can bind British wool into upholstery filling, offering a natural alternative to petrochemical foam and synthetic binders. The goal is a grown upholstery system using biodegradable fibers sourced in the UK.

Here, the practice moves from poetic surface toward a practical question for interiors. How can a cushion, panel, or upholstered form be grown through relationships between fibers, roots, and local materials? In this context, Rootfull design becomes a proposal for the furniture industry, where softness is physical, environmental, and structural at once.

fullSPRING, Delyth Fetherston-Dilke and Rootfull, 2025. image © Rootfull

garments cultivated from seed

The bio-couture projects push this idea toward the body. In Rootfull’s fashion collaborations, roots grow across templates and bind with cloth to create lace-like panels and garment sections through cultivation. The Phoebe English collaboration produced a stitch-free dress, with root-grown lace suspended from a ripped cotton strip bodice and held through knots and ties.

Other experiments with ACIEN and Purified show how the studio is testing root material across fashion and footwear. Purified x Rootfull explored shoe soles designed to return to the earth after wear, using post-consumer waste as part of a growth mechanism for future textile cultivation.

These projects keep the work speculative, but they also make the questions feel tangible. What might a garment become when its material can grow, be worn, and reenter a biological cycle?

plant root dress, Rootfull, 2022. image © Rootfull

installations with a temporary life

Rootfull’s installations give the material a public scale. For ROOTED: Material Ecologies at Messums West, the studio was selected for a large-scale, site-specific, ephemeral work using non-hydrocarbon-based materials, first previewed in the 13th-century tithe barn at Messums West and later presented at First Light Festival in Lowestoft.

The setting matters. In a historic barn or on the edge of the sea, root-grown material carries a different kind of presence. It can appear, dry, shift, and eventually return. This temporary quality gives the work a sense of responsibility. It asks design to consider what remains after use, and what can be given back.

Purified x Rootfull, The Future Fabrics Expo 2025. image © Rootfull

a slower material imagination

Rootfull’s strength comes from the way it makes growth visible without turning nature into decoration. Holloway works with roots as active collaborators, shaping conditions while allowing the plant’s own movement to complete the piece. The studio’s patent-pending methods point toward material futures for interiors, fashion, and public art, but the work stays grounded in the simple fact of seed meeting water and time.

In Rootfull’s world, design begins with what usually stays buried. The root becomes lamp, textile, garment, and wall surface, carrying evidence of a living process into the built environment. It is a gentle proposition with real force behind it: materials can be cultivated with patience, shaped through collaboration, and returned with care.

ROOTED: Material Ecologies at Messums West, Tisbury, UK 2025. image © Rootfull

Rootfull founder Zena Holloway. image © Rootfull

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