Back and Forth- 2 person exhibition—Marianne Fairbanks & Sofia Hagström Møller

Back and Forth is a 2 person exhibition featuring the work of Marianne Fairbanks (USA) and Sofia Hagström Møller (DK),  who live an ocean apart and have developed a creative exchange of ideas that push both to unfold and invent new approaches to their practice and textile based works. They will show works, created over several years, made remotely and together, that show a visual dialogue between their culturally informed approaches to weaving and making, highlighting a playfulness in material use, color and sculptural experiments. 

In the summer of 2024, during a 2 week residency at @thejellyreading they started using cardboard and other discarded materials in their studies and experiments to push weaving into more dimensional forms. 

FEBRUARY 27 - MARCH 28, 2025

Reception: Thursday, February 27, 4:00pm-6:00pm

Joyce Paddock Bliss Gallery

Carroll University

Main Hall, Waukesha WI 53186

Funders that have helped make this possible:

UW Madison, Jorck’s Fond, Danish Art Foundation, Knud Højgaards Fond, Grosserer LF Foghts Fond, Tage Vanggaard og Hustrus Fond

On Weaving

April 23 – July 13, 2024

On Weaving celebrates the many facets of woven textiles by exploring the traditions and innovations of works made both on and off the loom. By presenting these techniques as a focal part of creative practice, exhibitions and related program activities highlight weaving as key to the continued history of textiles and foundational to fiber art as a contemporary art discipline.

On Weaving engages nationally and internationally recognized artists who will be exhibiting, teaching, and talking about the processes and inspiration that feeds their practices. Of these artists, we have asked: what about weaving – woven structure, the freedom, constraint, complexity or simplicity of it – keeps you at the loom? We hope by engaging the broad sensibilities of weaving that the extraordinary works on exhibit will inspire our in-person and virtual community of appreciators, makers, scholars, students, professionals, and visitors to recognize the significant contributions of textiles and fiber arts to the vocabulary and discourse of contemporary art.

The exhibition includes works that emerge from a simple frame loom or found object, to the complex structures of digital hand-jacquard weaving. Focus on woven structure is not just a physical aspect of the work, but is an expression of the way these artists think. Techniques employed reveal a great deal about motivation and creative problem solving. From loom assisted and controlled weaving to hand interlacing, from technology to anti-technology, from preserving tradition to innovations that amplify or defy it, from cultural to environmental to social influences—the labor intensive processes used in weaving carry myriad personal narratives, communicated by each artist through their featured works.

Textile Center | A national center for fiber art

textilecentermn.org • 612-436-0464 

3000 University Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414

Interlacements Exhibition at Køng Museum in Denmark

Please join us on August 26th from 13-16 for the opening reception of INTERLACEMENTS, an exhibition featuring new work by Sofia Hagström Møller & Marianne Fairbanks.  

Bygaden 27 Denmark

Weekly Hours: 12-16 Saturday and Sunday

Sofia Hagström Møller (Denmark) and Marianne Fairbanks (USA) are artists who approach weaving with a playfulness of process that destabilizes conventional value systems of hard and soft form-making while digging into more philosophical and personal understandings of woven entanglements. This international collaboration allows each artist to unravel the historical and cultural origins of weaving that can be intersected to reveal new narratives and forms in this expansive global cultural moment.

koengmuseum.dk

postcard for Interlacements

The Art 5- Interview with Hannah Payne

I had the pleasure of being interviewed for this new blog by Hannah Payne. Such a pleasure! Click here to check it out!

Politiken Article--Lace up your shoes and get out the door.

What an honor to have Loud Volumes Soft Stuff written about by LARS HEDEBO OLSEN.

Grateful to Martin Yam Møller for this translation into english.

Lace up your shoes and get out the door.

 In Bredgade in inner Copenhagen, there is this week a singular opportunity to experience textile art that it’s unlikely that you have ever seen before.

Forget about grandma's fastidiously woven tablecloths and pillows on embroidery. In Sofia Hagstrøm Møller and Marianne Fairbanks' universe, there are loose threads (the ones you usually cut off after weaving), plastic strings, wooden sticks and fringes.

Still, the resulting artworks are the very opposite of frivolous, and display a craftmandship’s precision and intent, that is both sharp and accurate, yet at the same time fabulously playful and surprising.

The works speak together, but they also illuminate and explore different directions. That is to be expected, because the two artists have only met each other a few times since they connected with each other on the social media Instagram.

Swedish-Danish Sofia Hagstrøm Møller is a trained weaver and designer, but goes completely fearlessly to her loom, which means that she created works that are, on one hand, very classic and on the other hand totally new.

American Marianne Fairbanks is a visual artist in Madison, where she also teaches visual art. She uses the loom and textiles as canvases and isn’t quite as bound to the craft traditions of weaving as Hagstrøm Møller's approach, but instead constantly challenges the woven textiles as a material and aesthetic. 

One day they discovered each other's stuff on Instagram and started communicating, and quickly they agreed to do something together.

From elegant to twisted

The result is the exhibition in Officinet, which they have created from across the Atlantic. The corona pandemic prevented them from meeting physically, so for a few months one has been working in Copenhagen and the other in the USA. And so they have communicated digitally, as well as through a steady stream weaving samples and materials which they have sent back and forth.

Both artists are in essence storytellers, and where Hagstrøm Møller carries on her family's traditional weaving, Fairbanks goes more intellectually to the task. Hagstrøm Møller weaves something that the women in her family could have woven, but she deconstructs the traditions so that the colors become different, the patterns get an edge, and fringes of the string materials remain. Fairbanks' weaving can look like open books and graphic patterns and seem purposely a little more elegant in their expression than Hagstrøm Møllers, who is quite twisted.

There is something calming about textile art when it is expressed in precise and harmonious works, such as tapestries and rugs. However that kind of thing we've seen lots of, and we will happily continue to do so, for these craft traditions are still very much alive. But the exhibition in Officinet is no soothing experience. Fortunately. This is because the woven artform itself is being pushed in new directions by Hagstrøm and Fairbanks, who dare to play. Using basically the same classical techniques, along with modern visual arts, they modify and expand the norms of what a weaver is allowed to do. That's why it's fabulous.

New Article Published! -A Dialogue about Social Weaving: The Weaving Kiosk and Weaving Lab

Please check out this new article written with Jessica Hemmings and Rosa Telnov Clausen about the Weaving Lab and Weaving Kiosk!

https://www.academia.edu/45048231/_A_Dialogue_about_Social_Weaving_The_Weaving_Kiosk_and_Weaving_Lab_

published in TEXTILE, DOI: 10.1080/14759756.2020.1856549 (2021) “A Dialogue about Social Weaving: The Weaving Kiosk and Weaving Lab” © Jessica Hemmings, Rosa Tolnov Clausen & Marianne Fairbanks

Abstract : Adopting the format of an edited and annotated conversation, Danish researcher and designer Rosa Tolnov Clausen, American artist and professor Marianne Fairbanks and British writer and professor Jessica Hemmings discuss some of the circumstances in which community hand weaving projects may flourish. Decisions around the types of space Clausen’s Weaving Kiosk (2017–ongoing) and Fairbanks’s Weaving Lab (2016–ongoing) have occupied, how hand weaving may be made portable, the impact of duration and responsibility toward the material, as well as social, outcomes are discussed. While our conversation tries to understand what is shared by the Kiosk and Lab, we also acknowledge where different cultural and historical contexts cause the potential and challenges of these two initiatives to differ. The Weaving Kiosk and Weaving Lab are not intended as performances, but instead place emphasis on how hand weaving may build social connections. The format of this article foregrounds the conversational nature of social hand weaving and hopefully offers inspiration to others interested in expanding the purpose of contemporary hand weaving and textile scholarship.

Weaving Lab, 2017 (exterior)

Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, Madison WI

Flagging tape, adhesive, vinyl signage

Weaving Lab, 2019 (interior)

Copenhagen Contemporary

Photo by Lara Kastner

Weaving Kiosk, 2018 (exterior)

Kalleria, Helsinki

Photo by Johannes Romppanen

Weaving Kiosk, 2018 (interior)

The Nordic Culture Point, Helsinki

Photo by Johannes Romppanen

Weaving Kiosk textile

The Nordic Culture Point, Helsinki, 2018

Photo by Johannes Romppanen

Weaving Lab materials packed up, 2019

Oslo, Norway

RAM Galleri

Weaving Lab materials unpacked, 2019

Copenhagen Contemporary

Photo by Lara Kastner

Weaving Kiosk packed and unpacked in Stockholm, February 2017.

Photo by Martin Born

2020 China and USA Technology and Innovation in Fiber Art

I am honored to have work in this incredible online exhibition!

virtual exhibition, November 23-December 24, 2020

fibertechart.ad.tsinghua.edu.cn

symposium, Friday, December 4th 8-10pm (USA EST)/

Saturday, December 5th 9-11am (China time)

VooV Meeting (International)

https://meeting.tencent.com/s/edPnilleZmpc

Meeting ID 243 699 390

 Mi-Kyoung Lee, Professor of Fibers/ Textile, School of Art from University of the Arts and

 Yue Song, Associate Professor of Fiber Art Department, Academy of Arts and Design from

Tsinghua University are co-curators and organizers for the 2020 China and USA Technology and

Innovation in Fiber Art virtual exhibition which opens Monday November 23rd through December

24th, and the Symposium event which will held on Friday, December 4th at 8pm (USA EST)

hosted by Tsinghua University in Beijing.

2020 China and USA Technology and Innovation in Fiber Art virtual exhibition presents

contemporary Fiber Artists who have demonstrated their research and investigation in innovative

approaches in textile methodology, materiality, and technology. Twenty leading artists from China

and twenty artists from the United States manifest a variety of approaches in their art making

from the traditional textile hands-on process of weaving, sewing, and dyeing and more to film,

installation, and performance.

Gradient Slippage

This exhibition is included with Lin Lecheng, Hong Xingyu, Yue Song, Jin AnSha, Gao Jing and

Lu Gi, Wu Fan, Ren Guanghui, Li Hui, Xie Yong, Yang Jing, Li Wei, Wang Jian, Zeng Qiaoling,

Shi Jindian, Gu Yue, Jia Zijian, Jiang Yunge, Huang Yan, Guo Yaoxian, Wang Lei from China,

and Andrea Alonge, Danielle Andress, Jennifer Angus, Liz Collins, Lia Cook, Annet Couwenberg,

Jessica Dolence, Marianne Fairbanks, Marcie Miller Gross, Jane Lackey, Mi-Kyoung Lee,

Abbie Miller, Mark Newport, Rowland Rickett, Warren Seelig, Piper Shepard, Heather Ujiie,

Tali Weinberg, Anne Wilson, Jayoung Yoon from the United Sates.

Lia Cook, Anne Wilson, Mark Newport, Lin Lecheng, Ren Guanghui, and Li Hui as well as

Mi-Kyoung Lee and Yue Song will be presenters for the symposium event.

This project is sponsored by the Beijing Culture and Art Fund, and hosted by Tsinghua

University in Beijing and The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. The curators would like

to thank Surface Design Association, American Crafts Council, CraftNOW Philadelphia, and

European Textile Network, Zhuang Shi as well as many other media and broadcasting resources

in China and Europe to support this event. fibertechart.ad.tsinghua.edu.cn

Please contact Mi-Kyoung Lee at mlee@uarts.edu for any further questions.

I am in a new documentary called Our Corner of the Planet

A while back I was interviewed for this documentary which just came out on amazon.

Image, Structure, Fold

I am pleased to distribute an essay titled, Image, Structure, Fold, by Jordan Martins. Here is link to a PDF version, also there are printed hard copies available at the exhibition closing event.

A Deliberately Non-Straight Line

Closing reception:
Sunday, June 30, 2019 3:30-5pm
Compound Yellow
244 Lake St. Oak Park, IL 60302

Booklet design by Erica Hess.

I will be teaching at Arrowmont!

WEAVING LAB: CONSIDERING PROCESS AND PRODUCTION

JUNE 23, 2019 – JUNE 29, 2019

4o yard bold and Weaving Lab coat

In this workshop students create woven cloth that can be made into usable goods. You will discover how time, labor, production, meditation, pattern and rhythm is needed to produce your work. Participants will conceptualize how cloth can carry meaning, including the passage of time and meditation. Class readings, discussions and presentations include historical and contemporary examples that will help form the context of your production and process. Open to all skill levels.

www.weavinglab.com

Weaving Lab will be hitting the road this summer! Chicago, Demark and Norway!

Weaving Lab will be hitting the road this summer (perhaps not in a sweet trailer like this but somehow we will be moving)! First we will visit @compoundyellow in the month of June- details to come

Then, in August we will be heading to Denmark and Norway!  If you know of a site that would like to host the lab, let us know! 

Speculative Weaving is the term I have coined to encompass an approach that bridges the divide between craft-based traditions and conceptual work wherein weaving serves as the nucleus of community engagement and the catalyst for broad interdisciplinary explorations. Participants are encouraged to approach the act weaving as an end in itself, while also considering the act in relation to conceptual domains of time, rhythm, meditation, and materiality. www.weavinglab.com @weavinglab.com

Second photo shows the Hour Towel project. —Each participant was asked to weave for 1 hour, creating a physical manifestation of time and labor. 

Third Photo shows the Album Towel.—Each participant was asked to select an album, play side A while weaving a right-facing twill, and then turn the record over to weaving side B and a left facing twill.  This project prompts the  weaver to consider the connection between the loom and music.

Fourth photo shows the Weaving Lab as it looked at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery in 2017.

Woven Together: The Influence of Sherri Smith

Fiber artist Sherri Smith’s influence has reached near and far thanks to her extensive exhibition history, publications, and 40 years of teaching at the University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design. This complementary exhibition highlights the work of 14 artists who studied under Sherri Smith at the University of Michigan. The exhibition includes unique examples of contemporary fiber and fiber-inspired works from artists working across North America. Weaving, sculpture, video, printed textiles, and mixed media assemblages will be on display.

Image: Marianne Fairbanks, The Heart of Being 1, 2018

Exhibiting Artists:

David Brackett, Deborah Carlson, Linda Duvall, Marianne Fairbanks, Geary Jones, Mary Ann Jordan, Janice Lessman-Moss, Sue Moran, Robin Muller, Kate Pocrass, Marianetta Porter, Denise Samuels, Jenny Schu, and Sheri Simons.

Begins -  Saturday, August 25, 2018 - 2:00 PM

Ends  - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - 5:00 PM

Solo Exhibition: More Air-like than Water

In More Air-like than Water, Marianne Fairbanks presents weavings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures in bold patterns and vibrant palettes--works that test the tensions between pliability and rigidity, micro and macro, material and immaterial.

-Receptions-           

]Opening: September 29, 2018 6-9pm

Closing Tea: October 27, 2018 1-4pm

And by appointment: 312-371-9293

Living Room -- 1530 W. Superior St. --  Chicago, IL 60642 

Teaching at Ox-Bow!

This summer I will be teaching a class called Speculative Weaving at Ox-bow. I am so excited!

Also excited because they used my work for the cover of the course catalogue! 

Here is more about the class...

Speculative Weaving, August 12-18, 2018

Weaving has often been associated with themes of time, rhythm, meditation, and materiality and for this workshop we weave small studies in response to these prompts. Students will be encouraged to consider the act of weaving as an end in itself, conceptualizing process, while also learning technical skills including tablet weaving, inkle weaving, finger weaving and pattern drafting. Woven studies will be developed on small portable looms and from there students will consider how they might invent new looms structures, weave into site-specific locations and create interactive projects. Concepts and theories will be introduced through readings, slide presentations and discussions that will provide the direction and inspiration for each student to develop their own inquiries and inventions.

Fiber Arts Designer Developing Fabric That Can Harness Sun's Energy

Cellphones, laptops, battery-operated flashlights, our electronics are getting smaller and our need for energy is getting larger.  So what if there was a way to take those items and mix them with your everyday routine to create an eco-friendly way to recharge them?  That’s the bright idea of Marianne Fairbanks who has two degrees in fiber arts. She classifies herself as a textile nerd and she is also an Assistant Professor of Textiles and Design at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Fairbanks says, “I love teaching this because everyone has a relationship to cloth. It's the first thing you touch as a baby. You are wrapped in a blanket. Every culture weaves. Every culture dyes. Every culture creates clothing to shelter themselves.” 

Fairbanks is on the cutting edge of an eco-friendly solution-based design revolution. She is trying to crack the code of renewable energy, making it accessible, and weaving it into our everyday lives. Back in 2003, she first infused art with a flexible solar plane to create a hand bag that could harness the sun’s energy to recharge cellphones or other small electronics.  Fairbanks said, “We showed it around a bit and people said, ‘Well, where can I buy one?’ And we were like what do you mean? This is just an idea. This is just a prototype.”

Fairbanks came to the University of Wisconsin, she met a chemist by the name of Trisha Andrews. Andrews had made a solar cell on a piece of paper and if you think about it, paper's actually quite similar to a textile. Fairbanks had a new idea to make a weave so the solar cells and fabric become one.

Let's say someone need to charge tons of batteries in the military or at a refugee camp, here is your bolt of cloth, unfurl it on the field and you have a light-weight, immediate power source where you can plug in cellphones, flashlights or medical equipment. The ideas are endless when fabric is used as the actual solar cell. “I mean let's face it. Our demand for energy isn't going to go away,” Fairbanks said.

The next new thing might be a Wisconsin Textile movement along the lines of buy local.  Fairbanks has had the opportunity to write a grant to activate a local textile and clothing culture here in Wisconsin. She is now working with an engineer and hopes to create a statewide textile network.  She is also excited about an organization called Fiber Shed. It looks around at what is happening to create sustainable textiles that can contribute to buying local. Fairbanks explains it this way, “So, we have taken the local food movement and everyone just sort of understands that now. Look at the popularity of the farmers market. It’s amazing. I guess our goal with identifying who are the farmers, who are the growers, who can process the material, who can weave the cloth, who can make the clothing, it is to try to create this textile loop in Wisconsin.”   At this point, it just another idea, another seed planted to create a new economy around local and sustainable textiles and clothing.

Related Links:

• Marianne Fairbanks website
• UW-Madison School of Human Ecology
• Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection at the School of Human Ecology

Tags:design / textiles / fabric / solar / energy

JOEL WALDINGER

Joel Waldinger is a reporter for the "Wisconsin Life" project and considers a sunset over the “big island” on Manson Lake to be a perfect ending to a day of fishing and fun in the Northwoods. 

Public Talk in Asheville NC at CCCD!

Center for Craft Creativity and Design

Marianne Fairbanks Artist Talk
Thursday, August 3, 6:30 pm

work table, 2016

Impractical Weaving Suggestions

Fairbanks’s will present her work that explores structures and effects embedded in the intersections of cloth that, because of their small scale, often go unseen and unconsidered. By inflating the scale, embedded layers of labor and sophisticated math-based systems are exposed. Her wall weaving installations made out of fluorescent flagging tape display the magnified structures in a radical palette of neon plastic material that feels electric and loud. Through drawings and jacquard weavings, Fairbanks poses questions around value, labor, and time more quietly. Fairbanks’s approach to color, process, and material offers a fresh and witty point of entry into the dialogue and tension that persists between high vs low, and industrial vs handmade. 

As well, Fairbanks will present her newest social practice research called Weaving Lab: Plain Cloth Productions. The lab serves as a site of textile production, exploring the creation of simple cloth on domestic floor looms. The public is invited to come learn to weave and contribute their time to experiments around time, rhythm, process, production, meditation, and pattern structures. While there are no hard answers produced in the lab, the woven cloth serves as poetic evidence of communal production.

 

Solo show at the Institute for Labor Generosity Workers and Uniforms

Directional Twills, 2017

Solo Show: Overtime

Institute for Labor Generosity Workers and Uniforms

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 8, 2017 --6:00-9:00pm

Marianne Fairbanks’s work in Overtime engages the binary logic of weaving, both metaphorically and materially, to question conventional value systems and political polarities.  Thinking through math, pattern, and language, Fairbanks presents bright plastic tape illustrations, screen printed posters, and a series of hand-woven tea towels. The work explores the relationship between time and production, probes the oppositions of binary language, and expands embedded mathematical patterns.  Both poetic and playful, the work encourages a deep engagement with our material world.

322 Elm Ave, Long Beach CA