We were lucky to catch up with Sarah Pottle recently and have shared our conversation below.
Sarah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
I feel so lucky that there are so many meaningful projects in my life to choose from! I would say that one of the most meaningful projects I’ve ever worked on is the One Year, One Outfit project that we started through the Rust Belt Fibershed back in 2020, where participants created outfits with all materials sourced from within 250 miles of Cleveland, Ohio. Soil-to-skin. Participants worked in teams or independently and had one year to create their outfits prior to the exhibition at a gallery space. The first cohort’s work was exhibited in November of 2021 at Praxis in Cleveland and consisted of 16 outfits created by 23 artists. Local sourcing means that garments were traced back to specific sheep, alpaca, deer, rabbit, plants– both the color, and the fiber. The farmers were a part of the conversation on fashion, and the artists ranged from textile designers to nurses to fiber farmers themselves.
We’re in the middle of our second cohort this year, and the project has grown. We’re expected to have about 25 outfits finished by approximately 35 artists this year. We won a residency at Wave Pool Gallery space in Cincinnati at the end of May, and we’re excited to put our outfits on exhibition there.
In 2020 we were just finishing up the first year of our Cleveland Flax Project, a community grown linen project that aimed to determine if local linen indeed grows well here and would be a worthwhile textile crop to bring back in a regenerative capacity. Once we had harvested all this local flax-for-linen, though, we didn’t really have anything to do with it as we needed to use it at a hand scale. Believe it or not, there is no mechanized process in the entire United States for processing flax into linen. US-grown-and-manufactured linen simply does not exist currently.
As that first year of the Cleveland Flax Project wrapped and my outbuilding was filling up with dried flax, we were discussing potential projects that would involve the community in connecting more to their clothes. I should mention that The Rust Belt Fibershed exists to create a more regional fiber supply chain. Think of it as farm-to-table for food, but only for textiles: fashion (the sexiest part of it), but also bags, linens, insulation, and more. We connect all parts of.a soil-to-soil supply chain, and getting the public involved in actually experimenting with the fiber and creating something on a hand scale that has a ton of meaning is a really important part of this.
Especially in the midst of the pandemic, we thought it would be really cool to create a container for folks that is fun, purpose-oriented, artistically-inspired, and place based. A place where folks could meet each other (virtually) and bond over shared passions, ideas, skillsets, and a final goal. That’s exactly what we got. And it was beautiful and so, so inspiring!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Sure! Jess (my identical twin sister and also the co-founder of the Rust Belt Fibershed) got into this work, in a way, back around 2009. We were both English teachers and were looking for some creative project we could use as a sort of art therapy for ourselves. We gravitated towards a set of old chairs we got off the side of the road that needed to be reupholstered. We thought, let’s get into this, and started ripping it apart. It was so satisfying to learn re-upholstery– to give an old chair or bench a new life. One that had some sort of artistic idea behind it, not just a standard chair. But we kept running into a snag:
The fabric. We just couldn’t find fabric we liked at remotely reasonable price point. Going through the uphosltery weight fabric at Jo-Anns was actually painful. And even dead-stock factory outlets we’d travel to had weird, plastic-y feeling upholstery. We started asking: what even is fabric? Where does it come from? How can we dye it ourselves? Could we– maybe– even make it ourselves?
That started us down the rabbit hole of experimentations in natural dyes, weaving, and talking to farms for sourcing. I should mention that we were both what we’d call “environmentalists” back at that time: avid recyclers, organizers of our respective environmental clubs at our schools, gardeners, organic farm volunteers on our summers off, and recovering from a college phase of punky anarchism– once we realized that the terrible fabric at Jo-Anns was basically plastic/oil, and that the dyes were actually plastic/oil, it was like we tumbled down a wormhole that we could never get back out of.
We landed in the natural dye world and really made that the foundation of the next of the crafts. We abandoned upholstery and threw ourselves into the amazing portal of natural dyes, learning all about how plants can create color on fiber. How it’s actually been done that way for millenia. It started connecting us to plants even moreso, and we started learning about cultivating dye plants we could use to dye fiber. We both started bringing principles of natural dyes into our work with students– things we were learning, like stewardship and care. Being teachers, we started running local dye workshops for community members who were interested in taking a trip into the portal with us.
Somewhere around 2014 we learned about this organization called Fibershed which was combining all the things we loved about what we were learning about fiber: local fiber, local labor, local dye, but then connecting it explicitly to human health, justice, planetary wellbeing, art, and even economics. It seemed like everything we were interested in. We leaned in and listened for years while we continued our own art-making and connection-building, and in late 2017, we founded the Rust Belt Fibershed to help create a soil-to-soil fiber system in our Cleveland area.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
Yes. Definitely. While we’re doing concrete work in the world of local supply chains, it’s undergirded by something far greater: relationships. We are looking to remind folks that everything is connected. That your shirt, even if it’s from a box store, comes from somewhere, was made by someone’s hands, created on machines that someone created with materials that come from the Earth. And that we have a choice in how we tune into these relationships to other beings and earthly materials, and that we can come into a right relationship with them and respect them or we can continue to be separate from them, and extract and exploit them: the humans, the materials, the relationships.
If we can help folks tend to their relationships to themselves and the world around them through a garment– we’re doing our jobs.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
A lesson we’ve had to unlearn is that we have the answers. We don’t have the answers.
We have questions. We have compassion. We have assets. We have connected, unique souls as a part of our community who want to live with purpose and beauty. And, we have a few strategies that– for right now– we think are helpful at creating a more thriving Earth, based on perennial wisdom and patterns we’ve observed.
And, we’re grateful for all the hard lessons that have humbled us and taught us this the hard way.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.rustbeltfibershed.com
- Instagram: rustbeltfibershed
- Facebook: rustbeltfibershed
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE-gKmWQPLM
- Other: Check out the rust belt fibershed community group : https://rust-belt-fibershed.circle.so/home
Image Credits
Suzuran Photography Emily Millay Photography