In January 2026, printmaker Prof. Taryn McMahon and printmaker/designer Fi Burnham and I collaborated on a series of three pieces around the theme ‘close to home’ for the Rust Belt Fibershed 2026 Symposium. For these, we used materials sourced from the fibershed, including alpaca, wool, flax and osage orange, and worked to create compositions woven into letter-like wholes. With these, created a set of screens to use in a textile screen-printing demo station at 78th Street Studios in Cleveland, Ohio. Kent State University students Fi Burnham (Visual Communication Design & Print), Jacob Schmidt (Textiles and Art Education) and Lyd Cohen (Textiles) worked to print the pieces on participants personal clothing and textiles. Through this project we synthesized the sensibilities of print-making, graphic design and textile arts, and demonstrated the capacity of fibers to tell stories and make connections.
