Dr Lynn Tandler
- Tutor (Research) Yarn & Woven Textiles
- Textiles MA
Dr Lynn Tandler is a weaver and academic researcher.
After graduating from Central Saint Martins (BA) and the Royal College of Art (MA), Lynn set up a design studio in London, where she has worked with agents and production mills in Italy for several years - producing and selling woven textile collections across Europe and U.S – while consulting to companies such as Nike, Phillips, Unilever and Hairstetics on the development of new materials (woven and fibrous). Lynn completed her PhD about the role of weaving in smart material systems before joining the RCA as the Tutor (Research) for Yarn and Woven Textiles. Her academic research currently examines woven textiles (past, present and future) and their relevance to smart textile innovations. Her work is anchored in the power of craft as a research tool with much of her practice and academic research evolving around the idea of breaking away from behaviorist tuition methods and the effects that such an approach could have on creativity and the production of new cloth structures - as well as applications.
Lynn has been a reviewer for the Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice and is currently the co-editor for ‘Vol.2: Wovens‘ in the upcoming Encyclopedia of World Textiles (Bloomsbury, due out 2023).
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Research interests
Lynn is an early researcher whose work is dedicated to the investigation of new structuring methodologies and the role of weaving in particular, as an agent for creating smart textiles. Through her practical research she has created a new weave structure that counter-intuitively expands in all directions upon stretch. She has also developed several tools for the adaptation of leno weaving on the loom.
Lynn’s interests reach out in two directions: towards science and engineering, and towards design. In particular, she is interested in the development of new textile components and smart woven architectures for specific applications; the creation of an interactive digital predictive tool for smart textile systems; and the exploration of weaving as a fabrication methodology on micro and nano scale.
Practice
Lynn works jointly as a textile designer, a textile engineer and an academic researcher. She brings scientific knowledge and engineering methods to her work, looking to create innovative materials that will open up new applications and aesthetic possibilities. Lynn works as a consultant for industry and as a Tutor in Woven Textiles and Yarn at the Royal College of Art.
Her work explores new forms of aesthetics in woven textiles through innovations in material structures - be it in fibres, yarns or weaves. Her interest in using unconventional materials in the construction of new textiles began as a postgraduate at the RCA and with the development of woven metal fabrics. Inspired by her brother who is a blacksmith, these collections borrowed their aesthetics and morphology from the art of metalsmithing and the forge.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Tandler, L. (2016) 'The Role of Weaving in Smart Material Systems'. Doctoral thesis. Northumbria University.
Kapsali, V., Toomey, A., Oliver, R. and Tandler, L. (2013) ‘Biomimetic spatial and temporal (4d) design and fabrication’. Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems, Vol: 8064, pp. 387–389.
