On a brisk and sunny winter morning in Turners Falls, MA, sculptor Fafnir Adamites is at the beloved local spot, the Five Eyed Fox. She is tucked away on a bench, holding her morning cup of coffee, enveloped in sunlight. “It feels like spring in here, I can’t get enough,” she remarks. Adamites has lived in Turners Falls with her partner, sound artist Neil Young, for over a decade, collaborating together on installations, and embedding themselves amongst local artists. Her place in the community is evident, as residents coming in and out of the coffee shop greet her by name, often remarking on her recent work or upcoming events in the community.

The Unwitting Reception of Someone Else’s Secret, 2016 | paper, handmade felt

Adamites has lived in New England her whole life, outside of a two-year stint in Chicago to complete her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “ I went to UMass for undergrad,” she says. “I think just the depth of different art and music communities that are specifically in Western Massachusetts is a lot of what kept me here after high school, and after college.” She notes that collectives like Flywheel Arts in Easthampton, and the plethora of galleries, artists, and weirdos in the region, have given her little to no reason to leave. In fact, they keep her alive and creative.

Since returning from SAIC in 2015, Adamites has unleashed a prolific amount of solo and group exhibition work. While traditionally engaged with felt making to create various shapes and environments, Adamites has recently turned to paper to construct her most recent installations. “One of the things that makes felt and paper so similar for me,” she explains, “is that both have kind of a physical appeal and a conceptual appeal, too. I call felt and paper chaos structures, because they are not made like a textile is made, in terms of weaving and having a rigid rib, a woven piece. Felt and paper are just chaotic masses of fibers. The paper pulp and the wool, and that idea of having a chaotic mass come together into something usable that can be a surface or a structure in some way on its own, is beautiful to me.”

“Impediment Series” “Impediment 2” Detail Image, 2016 | paper, steel, wood | one of a series of five | 17x7x7

For Adamites, the lure of creating felt and paper is the collaborative process of skill and surrender. Utilizing a “wet process,” she agitates wool and other fibrous material in hot soapy water. She utilizes wool with other wide-weave fibers such as muslin, silk, or burlap to create a unique struggle between the fibers during the felt process. “Wool shrinks and you get this really beautiful surface texture that is very wrinkled and kind of unruly. It takes the sort of rigidity out of the grid. That one material can overtake another material in that way feels empowering.”

The texture of Adamites’ pieces ebb between dark smooth lines of black, sooted paper, where the beauty lies in an up-close examination; and disordered tangles and crumpled masses forming shapes that are both alien and familiar. Her installation The Unwitting Reception of Someone Else’s Secrets feels ghost-like and haunting; her most recent installation, Cryptonyms, at Deerfield Academy, looks strangely post-apocalyptic and alive.

“Supporting Materials 3”, 2016 | paper 5x3x3 | one of a series of 20 small sculptures, detail

Woven deep within her material processes, Adamites meditates “on trauma, memory, and the legacy of emotional turmoil inherited from past generations” to conceptualize her own experiences and to create conversations amongst those who interact with her work. “I like the idea of creating physical spaces or physical pieces that can be sort of a placeholder for those invisible things,” she explains, “like depression, mental illness, and so forth. Whether it is the things we do not want to talk about, or the traumas that are invisible, I want to have a monument to those things now.”

Adamites creates work with the hope of offering a space for individuals “to have conversations with each other about difficult subject matters…the psychic burden and triggers all around us. And that is one of the few things that I can offer to help people, or at least to open some kind of space for dialogue for people to grapple with things that are so hard.” The focus of recent and upcoming work has been in creating “isolation spaces,” where a single person can enter into one of her sculptures and infuse the depths of their own emotions and experiences into her work. “It is not just about me and my grandmothers,” she says, “or whomever from my past. I want it to be something that more people can find their own place in, to tell their own story if they want to.”

The relationship between the fragility and impermanence of textiles, and the invisibility of trauma in everyday life, coalesces in multiple spaces of meaning for Adamites. “The idea that your work may break down and completely disappear seems scary for many people who want to archive their work. I embrace the devalued nature of these materials and their ephemeral state. For me, to work with materials like this is a kind of lesson every day in impermanence, and needing to be flexible and roll with unpredictable changes. It expresses both my conceptual explorations of what may not be seen and the reality that my art can be both fragile and present.”

Fafnir Adamites is a sculptor living and working in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Her work will be on exhibition at the A.P.E Gallery in Northampton, MA beginning in February 2016 and at the Boston Sculptors Gallery in Spring 2016. For a more intimate look at her work, check her website and news page.

All photographs courtesy the artist.

Top photo:“Dead Reckoning is Subject to Cumulative Errors”, 2016 | paper, MDF panels 16x2x1.5 | part of the “Groundless Wayfinding” exhibit at Greenfield Community College, February 2016

The post Finding the Meaning in Making appeared first on Take Magazine.

“How many people wanted to work in a brewery in 1979?” asks Jacob Long during our discussion about fashion. Long’s American Woolen Company (AWC) is one of only two luxury worsted and woolen mills in the US. “It’s about craftsmanship applied to all – look at the beer industry,” he explained. “American brewers have been able to establish for themselves a proprietary taste in craft beers.”

Long makes a compelling case. As with American breweries, American fabric manufacturers can bring new, luxe products that are created with skillful artistry with New England especially primed to provide a home-base for these new luxury industries. The proprietary product of American Woolen Company, located in Stafford Springs CT, is unabashedly unique, but its potential to become a massive cultural movement and economic powerhouse comes from our history.

“No one wanted to work in a brewery then,” Long finishes, “Now? Kids are dying to get an interview and start a career at breweries.”

The prêt-à-porter and couture fashion seasons begin with fabric manufacturers about two years ahead of when the clothes will be sent down runways. Fashion designers work with these luxury mills to establish colors, textures, source material, and numerous other details. As the only mill in America that produces fabrics in alpaca, noble fibers, and cashmere, American Woolen Company fills a vacuum in the indulgent fabric market. As a result they’ve become a huge hit with younger designers who want to domestically source their material.

Red Color Story Fall/Winter 2017 |
Photo courtesy of American Woolen Company

Color, says Long, is what really ties the product to New England. “Europeans, by and large, think of American-style as either southern California or old New England,” Long explains. “Much of what we do is try to define the New England color aesthetic.” Each season’s color story comes from a different geographical region. Hudson, NY is influencing the AWC Fall/Winter 2017 scheme, with the town’s whaling industry past bringing bone white into the collection.

Long’s design model revolves around the idea that an American luxury aesthetic must begin with culturally-sourced colors and palettes. American fashion has long embraced buying extravagant fabric and materials from overseas, which brings the color trends of the Italian and French designers to American department stores – often resulting in higher sale prices. The clothing might embrace American design, but if the colors were American inspired, they tended towards stereotypical California beach tones or the hues of an autumnal New England meadow.

“It is a New England cut? An American cut?” Long extrapolates, “Sure, but it terms of the fabric there’s a lot of variables to be explored. The emphasis [by the fabric production industry] wasn’t on the advancement of an American fashion aesthetic all its own. Anyone can sell you fabric, but only we can sell you American woolen fabric.”

Successfully marketing a proprietary product is proving easy for American Woolen Company. Within their first year of opening, domestic fashion brands reached out to the company. “We are present at New York Fashion week…every brand we’ve been working with has an American capsule collection on the market, on the drawing board, or in the works.” Long says ninety-nine percent of their advertising is word of mouth with much of their clientele of young designers providing copious helpful publicity through their social media engagement.

Photo courtesy of American Woolen Company

Long seems thankful but unsurprised by AWC’s immediate popularity as fashion brands embrace several different types of American cultural looks. Although, Long still feels that, “[Americans] have fashion brands but we don’t have iconic luxury manufacturing. We don’t have them because we don’t have production in America.”

Indeed, in his search for livestock to get wool from, Long ran into a quantity problem. American sheep that are bred for woolen knits have extremely high-quality wool but there simply aren’t enough of them. Sheep farmers can make more money raising them for food. And yet, “Made in America, Made in New England – has tremendous export potential,” Long said, “People want to know what farm their food comes from, and want to apply that to clothes”.

Manufacturing, according to Long, is the key and revitalizing the industry in this country. Long was shocked to discover that New England, in spite of a lengthy and historic relationship with the fashion production world, has minimal textile production infrastructure. “If I can’t get workers at a machine, I can’t get anything,” Long explains, “but can you imagine if our consumer tastes shifted to Made in America, how many jobs we could create?” Rebranding textile manufacturing to be an appealing and lucrative career path might seem like a fruitless venture, but Long points, once again, to American breweries and their renewed cultural and economic prominence.

Jacob Long | Photo courtesy of American Woolen Company

Although Long’s past is in the business industry, his reverence for the fashion world is evident, “First, get the fashion right.” Craftsmanship takes priority overall, as it is with a great number of artistic industries in New England, but Long’s vision is to make the northeast the center of an American artistic revolution. In today’s political and economic climate, it is refreshing to hear an optimistic voice. Even more uplifting still, is to observe a company like American Woolen Company skyrocket to early success.

The post Seriously Fashionable, Made in America, Textiles appeared first on Take Magazine.