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 with natural dye and plant matter. Her practice, dyevert, explores connections between place, colour and the local environment through materials found close to hand.
She has been working with natural dyes for over a decade, developing a deep knowledge of locally sourced plant materials. She is particularly interested in the urban plant world, the weeds, street trees and overlooked plants as a source of colour and knowledge.
Postcode Colour extends this into a collaborative project, distributing the act of dyeing across postcodes around Australia and inviting community to engage with the plant life of their own 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.