Meet our Founder Hayley Caine
Hayley Caine has worked in the fashion industry for 25 years first as a designer, started sustainable denim brand Caine London and worked freelance as a fashion stylist working across celebrity and editorial. In 2020 increasingly frustrated at the fashion industry’s toxic ways and with the seed of an idea for patchUP she travelled to Peru to a lifechanging art residency to learn about plant dyeing at Arquetopia. Since then she has studied a Masters in Material Futures at Central Saint Martins, where she became obsessed with soil and biodynamic farming and became Head Grower at a rewilding project in London. Hayley Caine is a regenerative gardener, podcaster and creative researcher, working at the intersection of hyper-local colour, food and gardening.
Her work explores the temporal dimensions of growing fibre, food and dye materials.
She is particularly interested in the connections that can be made between these systems to create a regenerative future that supports plants, soil, people and microbes to flourish.
Across the different elements of her work, she sets out to cultivate a practice of mutual care, respect, and mutuality and acknowledge the entanglement of human and more than human lives.
As such, she aims to raise awareness and spark conversations on soil health and the climate emergency by reconnecting to ancestral ways of being and knowing, to help create a sustainable future of co-flourishing.
Hayley has designed a Community Dye Garden for Debdale Park Mamchester as part of Gorton’s Heritage Trail.
Hayley collaborated on Colours of Home x Company Place project with Alisa Ruzavina to create a series of natural dyeing, foraging and craft workshops to co-design a local colour palette for Aberfeldy Village and Poplar area, which was part of a wider public art installation created by Lola Lely, Vicki Hayward, and Ceres Studio.
She collaborated as an artist with Nat Linney on Cottonopolis: Lessons for environmental science through the lens of Manchester and her Cottonopolis Anthotype Series were shown at Textile Biennale 2023.
Alongside finding her passion in soil regeneration and founding patchUP, Caine consults to help brands incorporate sustainability into their core strategy to lower their environmental impact. It is her life’s mission to raise awareness about the climate emergency and climate solutions. Caine is the founder of PatchUP and a sustainability consultant at Hayleycaine.com, as well as a Garden Designer.
We are currently looking for spaces, be a field a community garden or roof top to work with the local community to grow food and colour…. please get in touch!
Ambassadors
Dr Laura Pottinger Fellow Manchester University