The Project
About Postcode Colour
Postcode Colour is a participatory natural dyeing project that begins with a simple question: what colours does your postcode hold?
Participants across Australia collect plant material from within their own postcode area — from gardens, parks, roadsides, creek banks, and kitchen scraps — and use it to dye a small swatch of cloth. The resulting swatch is returned to the project, where it joins a growing archive of colour mapped to place.
Each colour is a document. It records a postcode, a plant, a person, a moment in a particular season. Together the swatches form something larger: a portrait of a landscape rendered in the colours it produces.
Postcode Colour is one project within dyevert, Joanna Fowles’ broader practice exploring natural dyeing, colour, and community.
The Artist
Joanna Fowles is an Illawarra-based artist and textile practitioner working across natural dyeing, weaving, and participatory art. Her practice, dyevert, explores the connections between place, colour, and community through materials found in the environment.
Joanna has been working with natural dyes for over a decade, developing a methodology that prioritises locally sourced plant materials and minimal intervention. She is particularly interested in the urban plant world — the weeds, street trees, and garden escapes that constitute most people’s daily botanical environment — as a source of colour and knowledge.
Postcode Colour extends this interest into participatory form, distributing the act of dyeing across hundreds of postcodes and inviting non-specialists to engage with the plant life of their immediate surroundings.
Exhibition History
Postcode Colour
Melbourne Design Week 2026
Australian Tapestry Workshop, South Melbourne
March 2026
Future Goals
- —Expand participation to postcodes across Australia.
- —Develop a publicly accessible map displaying colour swatches by postcode.
- —Establish an ongoing lending programme for dyeing kits.
- —Partner with schools and community organisations to broaden participation.
Press & Publications
Coverage and publication details will appear here as the project develops.