Researcher Spotlights are Q&As that shine a light on School of Human Ecology faculty members’ unique scholarship and research interests.
Jennifer Angus is a professor of Design Studies and the Kay Vaughan Faculty Fellow of Design + Innovation. Her research is driven by her interest in pattern, and her studio practice involves creating installations using hundreds of insects, placing them in arrangements that suggest wallpaper and textiles. She aims to use these exhibitions to draw attention to the importance of insects and their plight caused by global climate change.
Angus is also the faculty leader of the Global Artisans Initiative, an interdisciplinary outreach program that connects students with artisans who have requested help developing a microenterprise (a business with fewer than nine employees). The program leverages UW–Madison relationships built over many years at global health field course sites in Ecuador, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal and Vietnam to create a product design and marketplace system to support the economic well-being of local artisans.
How did you become interested in your area of study?
My first love is pattern, and textile design is what I teach. In my exhibitions, the insects are arranged into patterns, and it may seem surprising, but I came to them through my interest in textiles. I was doing research in Northern Thailand and discovered a garment embellished with green metallic beetle wings. I had a lot of trouble believing they were real beetle wings — I’d never thought of insects as beautiful until then. I always say I have magpie tendencies because I love shiny things, and seeing that garment is really what drew me to insects.
During a three-month residency in Japan, I discovered that children regularly keep insects like rhino beetles and stag beetles as pets. I didn’t speak the same language as the kids in the neighborhood where I lived, but we had a common interest in insects, and they began dropping by and showing me what they had captured on the way home from school. If an insect was dead, they left it with me. For their amusement, I started making these scenes where I’d have a rhino beetle modeling a kimono fashion, or turn another into a sumo wrestler.
I wanted to find a way to combine my growing interest in insects with pattern. At first I was just experimenting with no clear vision. But as people began reacting to my insect installations, I soon realized why: When you put something in a pattern on a wall, it suggests a domestic space, a wallpaper. But what’s something we don’t want in the house? Insects. I watched people notice what looked like a flattened pattern from afar, and when they walked up to the wall, they would literally take a step back as they realized what it was. We like pattern, we know what’s going to come next in a pattern, but we don’t like creepy crawlies, so there was this tension — a sort of compulsion and repulsion at the same time.
How does your work impact human well-being?
It has been a personal goal to make a difference as the world teeters on the brink of broad ecological disaster. This might seem like a lofty endeavor, but I strongly believe in the ability of individuals to raise awareness, advocate and build momentum toward collective change. Other than clean air and water, insects — the primary material of my installations — are ground zero for human survival on the planet. Our fates are interconnected. We need them to survive. They pollinate, decompose matter and are a vital link in the food chain.
Artists are in a great position to draw attention to issues that people often want to avoid. We’re natural storytellers, so we’re able to interpret and distribute scientific research that might otherwise seem depressing, inaccessible or unworthy of consideration to someone without a scientific background.
In addition to my work with insects, a pivotal moment for me came in 2014 when I was part of a team that received a Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment grant to start what became the Global Artisans Initiative, or GAI. Wherever you visit around the world, people are typically making something, and visitors often buy these handcrafted goods as souvenirs. The root of the idea came when Lori DiPrete Brown, director of the UW–Madison Global Health Institute at the time, visited Ecuador and met a group of Indigenous women who made jewelry. After that, now-Professor Emerit Carolyn Kallenborn did the pilot project with her advanced apparel students and a group of lace makers in Mexico.
Since then, we have seen those women so transformed. Through research and design ideation, the students helped these women determine what they’d be most likely to sell and discovered that lace jewelry was in fashion. Students created inspiration boards and drawings, and those were sent to the artisans. The women went from making lace doilies for $5 to creating lace jewelry that takes them a quarter of the time that they can sell for four to five times as much money.
I currently lead our partnerships with artisans in Nepal, India, Ecuador and Vietnam. One of our most successful groups consists of basket makers in southern Nepal. There is no market for these baskets at all within the country itself — the expat community is small, and there aren’t many wealthy Nepalese who support craft. I was able to link these artisans up with the Association for Craft Producers, or ACP, to help them sell their product. We’ve established an internship with ACP, which is the largest and oldest fair trade organization in Nepal. I also teach the Global Artisans class in which students work directly with our artisan partners.
There’s only so much a person can do. Sometimes it feels like we get some good ideas started and don’t have time to completely follow through, but that’s the nature of working with students — the semester ends or they graduate. But working with GAI is what has made me feel connected to the school’s drive to improve human well-being.
What’s something you wish was more widely known by the average person?
What we do really well in the Textiles & Fashion Design program is teach students how to think in a way that they can apply to any creative problem-solving situation. So, they may be trained in textile design or fashion design, but these skills are very transferable to other fields.
What do you see as the most critical question currently facing your field?
Sustainability. How do we encourage people to have a limited number of outfits that are great quality, flatter their bodies and last forever, rather than buying lots of cheaply produced clothing? The very word “fashion” suggests change based on trends. The fashion industry is responsible for a huge amount of landfill pollution and so many human rights violations. How do we change that but still respect that everyone has a different budget for clothing?
How do you think about “paying it forward” as you gain experience in your field?
Being in academia gives you a wonderful opportunity to pay it forward because you are training the future. In my design classes, I encourage students to examine their own identities, draw from them and celebrate them. I work hard to expose students to and teach them about art from across different traditions and cultures. We recently had an Indigenous artist come and speak, and the week before, I took the students to Edgewood College to see a show by Mexican artists from Oaxaca. We’ve also been looking at traditions in Nigeria and Japan, and we’re about to start feltmaking, where we’ll be looking at traditions in Central Asia.
It’s been so important to me to help students find their people and see successful artists who look like them. I feel good that I have made a safe place for students where they feel they can come to me and I will support them in their goals.
What else should the Human Ecology community know about you?
At a recent academic symposium filled with scientists, I argued that artists can be interpreters of science; that artists can get people to at least look at something they may not want to, or better understand something that’s very dense, like climate change or extinction. Ultimately, if we want to effect change, it’s not going to be solely through a group of academics who read journal articles. To have these interdisciplinary research initiatives is really important.
