“They leave thinking about clothing differently”: Reviving a lost material with Marianne Fairbanks

BioRunway sat down (virtually) with artist, professor, and entrepreneur Marianne Fairbanks to talk about her passion for the hyper local and how her work with textiles and social art practices led her to found the Hemp Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Caitlin Nobes: How do you describe your work to people who are unfamiliar and what path brought you there?

Marianne Fairbanks: I’m trained as an artist and this made me a critical thinker and an expansive thinker, which is what’s led me into a really interdisciplinary practice.

I often talk about the three prongs of my practice. The first being my solo career as an artist. I make work individually and work to find time for reflection and experimentation in my studio. I hone my making skills and challenge myself to use new materials or weave on the digital loom, which takes a lot of brain space.

I also have a social practice. In Chicago I was in a collaborative art group for more than 10 years. When I moved to Madison I thought that was done, but it turns out it just exists in me always, so my first research output in that light was the Weaving Lab, which I launched at the WID [Wisconsin Institute for Discovery] in the summer of 2016.

Finally, there’s entrepreneurialism. In my past life, I had a small business integrating solar panel technology into things like handbags and messenger bags — that was called noon solar. What started as a conceptual art project turned into a business, because to have the impact we were hoping for, in terms of getting people to integrate small scale solar power into their day-to-day life, selling a product in the form of an accessory made the most sense. you realize you have to abide by capitalist protocols. Now I have another small business called Hello Loom, where we make and sell laser cut looms on our website and through stores around the country and the world.

Caitlin: I’m interested in this third piece around entrepreneurialism. I think a lot of people get into biotech and fashion from a love of fashion or science and then have to figure out the capitalism side. How do you balance your artistic endeavors with deciding what needs to be a capitalist endeavor?

Marianne: Well, being a professor is my full-time job and without that subsidy and ongoing paycheck, I don't think I would be able to do any of the other stuff. For the first two years, I gave the looms away for free, because I could as part of my research. But when I stopped hosting the [social weaving] lab and people were still asking for the loom, my budget wasn't unlimited.

I think one of the reasons that I don't mind it so much, is because it's like a game or a challenge: how can I create a capitalist model that I'm proud of? It’s always on my terms, so I don't maybe make as much money, but that's not the driving force.

“What felt radical to me at the time was the idea of trying to reimagine what local production around fashion and textiles would look like.”
- Marianne Fairbanks

Caitlin: I’d love to pivot and talk about the Hemp Lab because that was what connected us in the first place. I’m curious up front about how you got interested in hemp. I feel like it’s not something I’d heard much about until maybe the last five years.

Marianne: My interest in hemp starts from this notion of hyper local sustainability. When I came to teach here [at University of Wisconsin, Madison] about 11 years ago, a lot of fashion and textile companies where our students were getting jobs only have international production. As someone really interested in sustainability, I find that to be the opposite of what we should be trying to create. I find it a little sad that we graduate students and send them elsewhere to design a bunch of stuff that will get made elsewhere.

So, I think what felt radical to me at the time was the idea of trying to reimagine what local production around fashion and textiles would look like. We were thinking about models from food here in Wisconsin and the farmer's market, that was out of fashion for a while, and then it became very in fashion to buy your food locally. So the question is: how do we borrow the local food model to create a local textile and fashion economy?

Then hemp became legal and Assistant Professor Shelby Ellison, who is a plant geneticist, actually came to me wondering if we could partner to find ways to use hemp beyond CBD.

It was pretty exciting that she, as a scientist, reached out to me with a locally grown and sustainable raw material to see if we could make some hemp textile.

I found it pretty compelling that hemp is a plant that's been used for thousands of years and we have literally lost any knowledge of how to process or grow it because of its illegality in the state and country for the last 70 years.

I do feel like I'm trying to reinvent the wheel. There were people that worked with this plant in this state 80 years ago and today we have none of the tools, none of the intelligence, to process it properly.

Caitlin: I have more questions about the Hemp Lab, but I didn’t realize hemp was being used that widely for millennia! I wonder if you could tell me a bit more about the history of hemp and textiles, especially in Wisconsin.

Marianne: The first thing you should do after this call is go on to YouTube and look up Hemp for Victory. It's a video that was put out, you know, during World War 2, and it shows processing in for sure, Wisconsin and Kentucky, I think it was all being made into ropes and cordage. It’s inherently very strong.

But when it became illegal, all that equipment was gone. I heard a rumor that it all got bought by India but I don't know. In my dreams I imagine someday I'll find a barn in the countryside and then all that equipment will be living somewhere half an hour from here.

Historically, countries like Korea and China are leaders in hemp, where it was first indigenous. In Japan, in Korea, in China, there's this long history of translating lots of different plants with sturdy stalks and extracting fiber that can be spun into a thread and made into a textile.

Caitlin: It’s wild to think so much was lost from what was a big industry not that long ago. So a colleague reaches out about working with hemp, where does the Hemp Lab start?

Marianne: I first had the vision to make some hand tools and I bought plans for a series of hand tools. When you look at them you think these look so archaic and I mean, they are. I bought plans for the tools and then I hired a local wood worker named Sylvie Rosenthal to make all of the tools for our hand processing. I think this set of tools actually is for linen, but the plant types are so closely related that you can use it for either.

That was the first stage and then the second stage was realizing that I need people involved in this — I'm not going to just sit there and break hemp all day. And I guess intuitively, I just realized I needed help. I wanted people to learn about all the potential, and that's where the Hemp Lab started a couple years ago and it's where we invite classes. We have volunteer sessions, and if I can, I hire students to run experiments where we're trying to figure out what we can do with the plant that we get.

“We have a conversation about where fibers come from — they leave thinking about clothing differently”
- Marianne Fairbanks

Caitlin: What are some of the successes you’ve seen? Whether that’s breakthroughs or progress, what got your heart beating?

Marianne: I think one of the successes is how we have been able to bring in a wide range of students to work in the lab. Shelby, for example, has agriculture students who take a cannabis course and for extra credit can go to the Hemp Lab and process this material. I love the idea that students get the chance to get off their computers and touch and process materials for two hours, and might come away with a better understanding of the labor that goes into making the clothes and textiles in their lives!

We have a conversation about where fibers come from and so maybe that's the most helpful — they leave thinking about clothing differently

Another thing I've been proud of is I had a team of graduate students who came to me wanting to make hemp toilet paper to enter this business design competition. And I think that's cool but I know in practice there’s no manufacturing facility in this state, which we have a lot of, that is going to convert to manufacturing hemp like this.

I nudged them into researching hemp-based packaging solutions that we could make in the lab. They worked with hemp hurd [the stalk of the plant, not the fiber] and mycelium to grow them together into a Styrofoam substitute. They focused their attention on creating packaging for things like CBD bottles of oils and things, and worked with a local mushroom farmer here in Madison to learn more about how to work with mushroom spores. I think these are some of my favorite studies because you’re using two readily available materials and even if every industry adopted hemp for multiple uses, the plant will still produce the hurd.

Caitlin: That goes well into my next question, which is about the traits of the hemp you have. We’ve been working on an article about cotton as a biotech, how it’s been bred for specific traits for centuries. I’m curious what the traits of the hemp you’re getting is, which is from the cannabis industry, as opposed to what a plant bred for textiles might be like. What have we lost from breeding for cannabis over fiber?

Marianne: There is a lot lost, sadly, in that 70 to 80 year gap of growth and production. I get really frustrated, sometimes, because the hemp fiber we are making can feel so rough and scratchy but I know it has the potential to be soft and comfortable. Growing hemp for fiber isn’t getting a big grant funding right now because we don’t have the industry to process it yet. I am really looking forward to seeing that area of industry grow.

The fiber hemp is very different from the CBD hemp in that what I need for textiles is long and skinny with no flowers or buds. For textiles, the hemp seeds are a fiber varietal planted close together, to grow up tall and skinny. Getting quality long line hemp fiber comes from a different planting than cannabis grown for CBD.

One other interesting thing that Shelby has been doing as part of her research is going around and collecting feral hemp. She's gone around the Midwest and found evidence in plant material from ditchweed, that hemp has been just growing on its own for the last 70 years. So she's trying to take those seeds and understand what has allowed them to propagate so long and so strong, and wonders if we can cross that kind of strength into whatever other plant material that she's developing.

Caitlin: I love that phrase. Feral hemp sounds great!

Marianne: I love the idea of feral hemp.

The other challenge in this country is that what's beautiful about hemp is it's this long, bast fiber that has great anti-microbial properties and is very strong. Places like Belgium and France and Eastern Europe and China have facilities that can take that long line and spin it. We don't have any spinning capabilities. So what we do is we chop it into short fiber, and we process it into something that looks like cotton. We are taking away all these amazing properties inherent to hemp so the fiber can mimic cotton and be run through our machinery.

Caitlin: Before we wrap up, what are you working towards? What are you intrigued by or frustrated by that’s keeping your attention right now?

Marianne: One of the things that has continued to stump me is how to process the material in a way that isn't further destructive to the Earth. I think historically, we've just put a bunch of chemicals or heat on it to soften it. How do we find methods that aren't as energy consuming or chemical consuming?

I realized that this is a hard thing to solve. But then you realize people are working on this from other fields, we're just not applying it to this one. For example, we have people who want this for wood products, because we want to make it into paper. There are natural glues like pectins and lignins that once removed make a softer more pliable fiber. Finding innovative ways to remove these to soften the fiber is a goal of mine.

Caitlin: With these successes and challenges in mind, what’s next for your work and the Hemp Lab? What’s the vision?

Marianne: I have a vision of someday having an exhibition where I've invited all these different makers with woodworkers, ceramicists, textile artists and so on to work with the raw material and see what new work they can invent. I'm excited to do that someday, but haven't quite gone there yet.

We need the policymakers who are approaching the state to figure out how to convert paper mills to using hemp. In my little corner being a designer, an artist, I don't know how to tackle those. So that's why it was fun to have the conference to figure out what we would need in place to shift our economy to local production.

And our research isn’t just for us. At UW Madison, we work to apply the Wisconsin Idea and understand how it might affect the people in the state. And I think that's a cool responsibility and that keeps me going.