SOCIAL FABRIC: A Community Rugmaking Project

The project will take place at Bombyx: Center for Arts & Equity throughout the month of December. We will create a felt rug over the course of the month, and then auction it off on January 27th to support the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts. Anyone who wants to will be able to participate in designing and creating the rug. Feltmaking is by nature a particularly communal activity, utilizing shared rhythms and a dance-like coordination of bodies. The collaborative aspect is what I find most exciting about the work that I do—the moments of complete community—where creativity, physical activity, and resources are shared, and something is able to be produced that one person alone would never have had the capacity to do. I also hope to gather percussionists, who will jam to the rhythm of our work, keeping the beat for the feltmakers, while creating another layer of spontaneous communal art. We will use colored scraps that I have collected throughout the year for the decorative surface of the rug, as well as local wool donated by The Hartsbrook School, Barberic Farm, and Brook’s Bend Farm.

Read about last year’s project in the Hampshire Gazette