^{why is this weaving residency important?}

Like architecture or cooking, weaving is both practical and beautiful. Whether one reaches twelve thousand years back to the first forms of fabric in the Neolithic era, two thousand years back to the soaring silk tapestries of The Han dynasty, or two hundred years back ago to the first Shaker tape seats, the intertwined elegance and efficiency of woven things is more than just a technology and more than just an art. It is an essential expression of the language of things, a way of thinking of the past, present and future as a unified whole in which every part depends on every other part, and a disciplined practice in which one is perceived by what one perceives.

Threads do not cut one another off or interrupt one another, but give way to one another: one strand passes below or above another, each giving the other its time in the foreground, each anticipating the other, each making the other stronger and more powerful. They relax into interdependence. A fabric is a perfectly cooperative thing. Like the oscillation of the sun and the moon, the turning of the seasons, the cycle of birth and death, or the movement of the tides, weaving marks out a vital rhythm of cosmic proportions. Perhaps, then, weaving is no metaphor at all, but a metaphysical practice in which individuals participate in a very real fabric of being. 

We live in increasingly cold, dark times when the form things are permitted to take is almost exclusively that of the profitable or the secure, where borders and fences separate living things from one another, when compassionate contact with what is different or strange gives way to fearful withdrawal and separation. We offer this weaving residency not only as a chance to hone your craft but as a place, a stage, a loom of its own in which people, practices, and experiences can all weave into one another. Let it be a beacon in this darkness, a place where anyone and anything can discover what is common and communal between them, and where what is beautiful is also necessary.


^{OUR STORY}

This residency was created in the wake of our dear friend and teacher’s passing. Jess Green was an incredible force - a weaver, organizer, teacher, connector. She taught the importance of slowness, failure, desire, and the art of dreaming a new world together. She wove ceremony into mundanity, and lived with conviction.

The weaving residency was created as a way to continue Jess’s work. The looms and equipment offered as part of this residency are Jess’s looms. We hope this residency offers artists time to investigate, imagine and remember a life worth living.


^{About Jess}

“You held the expanse of the world we want in the tiniest interpersonal interaction and never let it go. You believed so deeply in people and the power of your belief was like a mirror into a self uncontended with. A challenge to be the person you saw with the necessary attributes to, as you might say, undo empire.

The idea of another world that is produced through will and passion might seem like fantasy, a space of privilege, divorced from reality, but within it and within Jess’ care, all that was real was welcomed. Practicing this spiritual and affective severing is a crucial ingredient of making ourselves capable of inhabiting revolutionary horizons.

What is vital about the creation of an other-world simply for the sake of it, is the full willingness to exit this one. These spaces of exodus make the attachments we have to this world more tenuous and our attachments to each other and our potential becomings richer. Maybe similar to how new forms of life develop in a contested autonomous zone, its inhabitants’ becomings not predicated on what they seek to exit and further severing the threads that hold us hostage.


^{The affective or spiritual exodus requires tending to as much as the material, Jess understood and was our greatest champion of this. I hope the hundreds of us that learned from her, who saw the seriousness of her proposal, who felt immersed in a world of a decidedly different quality and thought about never going back, can continue to tend to these other-worlds that are, in their slowness and failure, celebration and ceremony part of giving ourselves the space to dispense with this world that requires unraveling through revolution and also beauty.”  -  M}


“Jess’s teaching methods infuriated a lot of students who sought rigid weaving rules and precise dye formulas. For the first week of an eight week class Jess wouldn’t allow anyone to even touch the looms in order to create longing. Instead we did things like follow the threads of our attention as we each were assigned to follow and re-spool a single thread through weedy fields, across campus and through the brushy woods for hours at a time. Jess’s teaching methods were riddles that lead sometimes to answers and more often to questions.

She embraced duality and contradiction with every step of her wiggly and winding methods. She made small things special and did things like read to us aloud while weaving. Once she led us in a candlelit “light weaving ceremony,” had us hauling looms in trucks at four am to the site of black mountain college for us to weave to the sunrise. Unusual experiences and ceremonies were always prioritized as much as actual craft instruction. She taught us songs and we sang together. Jess laughed a lot and things always felt light and heavy at the same time, joy-filled and incredibly serious both.

Jess held reverence for time and would often do already slow tasks even slower.  People, life, animals, plants, boredom, the mundane were understood as essential parts of the work at hand. She instilled trust in her students in a way that always surprised me, the conviction of her belief could unlock so much.

She emphasized the importance of failure in her teaching.  I think she did that as a way to free students from the fear of attempting. So much fear of being bad at something in students. It really clogs peoples brains and makes them freeze up.  If being bad at something was ultimately the goal then people can feel safer knowing they can take more risks in their process. We love failure, we were actually TRYING to fail!

Jess modeled failure well, making grand attempts and sometimes getting partial buy-in from students.  Man, did she fail so beautifully. It inspired me to watch her continue, adjust and stay curious through the process of iterating the way she taught, and the ways she connected to people and her work.

I’ve never had another teacher like Jess. You learned so much just from being around her. Literal worlds were opened, seemingly disparate worlds collided. Portals and thresholds and parades and riffs and experiments and power and play. She loved really fully with her presence and had a way of making others curious, of making them scheme with her. I know the people who love Jess are left now to pick up the threads of how to continue the spirit of her dreaming and scheming. The energy behind that question, the urge she left in people is such a profound legacy to leave. We love you, I love today deeper because of you..”  - K