The following is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place in June 2020 between former friends of light members Jessi Highet, Mae Colburn, and Pascale Gatzen. The group reflected on how friends of light got started, aspects of making, the cooperative business, questions of pricing, and how the experience has informed our current work. Jessi spoke from Brooklyn, New York, Mae from Newburgh, New York, and Pascale from her new home in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Links to members’ current work and websites are included at the end of this interview.
Jessi Highet: So, I wonder if we can think back to what our initial interests were in friends of light and how we all decided to start this together. Pascale, would you like to start?
Pascale Gatzen: I think, among other things, it all grew out of Work Circles, which was a larger group of artists who had been meeting monthly in New York City to research collaborative making processes through textiles. I had been researching intentional communities and worker cooperatives for a while, and wanted to develop something that could evolve into an economic activity for a worker coop. Together with a group of New York designers, among them Laura Sansone, I connected with farms in Upstate New York, and through that came to know Sara Healey, farmer and owner of Buckwheat Bridge Angoras, a fiber farm in Elizaville, New York. So, there were a lot of lines coming together – the worker cooperative, intentional communities, the research I had been doing with farmers in Upstate New York, and our work with Work Circles – that all merged together, and for me it became friends of light.
Mae Colburn: My involvement? Well, I met all of you during Work Circles back in 2013, but my participation in friends of light started in 2015 when Pascale posed a question to me about weaving a jacket to form. I was at that point doing my M.A. and working as a Fellow in the Textile Department at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and I was very interested in technical questions about weaving. Pascale’s question about weaving to form felt like this technical challenge – I could look to historical precedents, and also enter into this very open-ended process of experimentation that ended up really influencing the way I think and work. So, it was this question of weaving to form that sparked my initial involvement.
JH: I’ll reiterate that Work Circles was a big moment in getting to know all of you. I knew Pascale beforehand from the Integrated Design program at Parsons School of Design, where I was a student and where Pascale was the coordinator of the Fashion Area of Study. I had worked with Nadia Yaron at the interior design studio that she co-founded, Nightwood, but Work Circles sort of lessened the hierarchy and put us all on a more equal level to discuss thoughts. I was fairly new out of college and thinking a lot about labor, doing a lot of different work, and also very interested in learning about weaving. So, those were the things that really drew me to friends of light in the first place: the ability to learn a lot from people that I was really feeling good about, and had a lot of respect for, and was already having interesting conversations with about labor and textiles. I was excited to continue those conversations.
PG: I think what became really important for me, as well, was the work that we did with Sara Healy. Developing the yarns together in the spinning mill on her property and being so closely connected to the farm, and understanding the care she took for the animals, and her depth of knowledge, and the love she had for the work she was doing to raise these fiber goats and fiber sheep. That was all very insightful for me, and very connecting. It was kind of a turning point for a lot of things in my life because I realized how meaningful it is to be so intimately connected to these very fundamental processes that provide for our everyday lives. So, the connection with agriculture and the animals and the fiber has been very impactful for me, and how we also continued with friends of light to search for that connection and to really value the labor and the time that goes into each of these processes.
MC: It’s interesting to hear both of you ground friends of light within these questions of labor and the creation of a worker cooperative. I came into that a little bit later. That was happening around me, but maybe I wasn’t paying as close attention to it as I was to this technical question of weaving to form. That said, I think it was ultimately very important for me to see how that broader intention of creating a business, a worker cooperative, informed our movement through the world and the range of understanding that it made possible. Like, as Pascale is saying, learning from Sara. Like learning from Justin Squizzero, who grows, spins and weaves linen at the Burroughs Garret in Vermont. Learning from Guillerma Escobar, who teaches backstrap weaving at The Weaving Hand in New York. It was interesting and important for me to translate this impulse toward research and history into a living context, an economic context, and it allowed us to connect with all of these pockets of expertise within the broader context of weaving, textiles, and cooperative work.
JH: I’m happy that you brought up these separate values of weaving to form, and our material sourcing, and all of the conversations we had about labor. I feel like those things, at some point, actually started to meld together for me. One of the things in the beginning that was really challenging for me, in a good way, was that I had been so used to trying to produce things quickly and just trying to get things done, and it was so exciting and energizing to sit down and discuss, ‘Well, is it okay to do things this way? What are the ethical implications? What are the environmental implications? Is this interesting to us?’ – to ask all these questions rather than just saying, ‘Let’s make a jacket. Let’s get it out there. End of story.’ And I think that pretty early on, I connected having these discussions about our values with how we chose to weave the jackets. Do either of you have any thoughts on that?
PG: Well, I remember making the first sample jacket, and it took 120 hours to weave, and I thought, ‘This is crazy.’ I think that’s also the type of conversation that we had: ‘Who’s going to pay for that type of labor?’ We were very nervous before our first sales event because in the end we had worked 160 hours on one jacket. More design came in, and more details, so it took us 160 hours. And I remember the struggle with this type of efficiency that you were talking about, Jessi. I very much had that conditioning inside of me, and I felt constantly like the production wasn’t going fast enough. I was fighting with this time issue in the beginning, and I think only now – and now it’s a few years later – I’m fine with it. I’m fine with doing things slowly. I’m fine with doing things by hand, and I actually really enjoy it once I allow myself that time and if I don’t question it, if I’m just with it in the moment. We talked about that in the text you and I wrote, Mae “The Productive Activity of Production” – that there’s a sense of belonging that comes from this type of weaving, and from sitting with it and just coming back to the same type of work, the repetition of coming back to that work. So, now I feel that working slowly is very nurturing and brings such values as well-being, community and belonging, but I do remember the stress in the beginning, Jessi.
JH: So, to respond to what you said about coming to terms with the time issue now – I can definitely relate to that, and to the push and pull of wanting to move things more quickly, wanting to be efficient. We would give ourselves timelines, and we were so kind to ourselves and kind to each other about these timelines, but nonetheless it was rare that we were actually able to meet them. I have a theory that that had to do with the push and pull that you’re describing, Pascale. We were sitting within this industry, or world, that values things that move quickly, and we were moving slowly and trying to honor that.
I wonder if either of you want to respond to that idea? I also think it could be a time that we start to talk about our experience with sales and monetization since you brought that up, Pascale – that we did feel quite nervous about selling the jackets at such a high price.
PG: I think what we did, because we were already so impressed by the number of hours that one jacket took to make, was we only counted the bare minimum to determine the price. We paid ourselves $15 dollars an hour for production, and then we included the material price. At our first sales events, we priced the jackets at $3,200. When I think of it now, I think that’s crazy. Having seen a few more things in the world, I think it’s a really low amount considering the labor. But to be honest, money is still a challenge for me. In the Green Worker Cooperative Academy, the worker cooperative incubator that we participated in during the spring of 2017, we learned that to sustain ourselves as a business, and to not only sell one jacket at a time, we would need to ask close to $10,000 for one jacket. That was mind blowing, and challenging for all of us because it’s a number that was so foreign to us in our lives. We all know of people who can afford that, but for me it was still really challenging to sell for that price. So, for me there’s still an internal conflict with the selling of the jackets. Not with the making of them, but with the selling of them – that people would pay that amount of money and that I can feel confident and truly know that this is the jackets’ real value.
JH: I think the question of ‘Am I worth it?’ – that’s really something that we dove into pretty hard when we were figuring out the price, and that was a big part of it because most of our price was labor. This question, ‘How do we value ourselves?’ – I think that may be one of the areas that I grew and learned the most with friends of light. Coming into it, we did our price calculations based on the time it took to make a jacket plus the cost of materials. But in fashion, often people think, ‘Well, how much would the customer pay?’ – and work with that, as opposed to, ‘How much do we value the labor, and how much do we respect the process, and how much do we need to make this sustainable?’ I’m happy that we continued that conversation, and over time kept pushing ourselves and kept pushing the market and our customer base to understand it. It actually turns out that I don’t think our customers really needed to be pushed. When we spoke about everything surrounding the jackets and our understanding of value systems, I think people knew that there would be a higher monetary price, and I think that’s something I’m carrying through in my own work now, too.
MC: Every week in the Green Worker Cooperative Academy we were asked to do interviews with potential customers, and there was a point – after we figured out that we should be charging close to $10,000 per jacket – where we were all trying to access people who might pay that amount, and we had a really hard time doing that. We didn’t personally know many people with that kind of wealth. For me, that question of price point and sales translated into a question of storytelling and narrative, and finding ways to frame all of this work – all of this connection, all of this collaboration, all of this hand labor – in ways that could carry the kind of value that someone would feel motivated to participate in by purchasing a jacket. That said, I still feel conflicted about the model of relying on the wealthy to support artisan labor and I don’t know a way around that yet.
PG: Well, I always enjoyed about friends of light – and I think we always positioned ourselves like this – that we were inclusive. We organized all kinds of events that were community events. And we also facilitated workshops and taught other people how to work with the methods that we were using. We invited people to weave their own jackets, using their own labor, because it was the labor that made the jackets really expensive. And then the people who did buy our jackets, I felt good about them. I mean, they didn’t pay the $10,000 because we never did a sales event with those types of prices, but I felt good about the people who did buy our jackets because they had a real appreciation for the work that we did and they had knowledge about it. They were specifically looking for and really valued the type of work we were doing. So, for me it was really encouraging that we had really nice clients. The clients we worked with really supported the values we were supporting, as well.
JH: I think this is something that also has to do with the global economy. Mae, you referenced going out and doing interviews for our Green Worker Cooperative class – and I know a handful of times during those interviews we were met with suggestions to outsource, or to send out the labor in order to lower the labor costs. Of course, that was completely missing the point, but it also makes so much sense considering how our world works right now where the goal is always to get cheaper labor, and not value the labor, and not value the hands that are working on it, but rather just ask, ‘Who will do this for less money?’
And on that thought, we framed ourselves as a business, we had an LLC, we went to the Green Worker Cooperative Academy, and we definitely learned a lot about the structures of a business and especially about the structures of a worker coop – but I wonder, looking back on it now, do you think of friends of light as a business or as a creative project? Or is it something in between, like a learning experience? And is something like friends of light even viable in today’s economy?
PG: Well, I think that we never were a real business in the sense that our lives weren’t dependent on our activities as a worker cooperative. If I look back now, I think that after completing the Coop Academy, if we would have gone for it, if we would have really decided to do it and make our lives dependent on it, it could have worked. I think you really need that type of ambition, otherwise there’s no necessity. We all had incomes on the side. We didn’t have the necessity to earn our income out of this venture. I think we always saw it more as a cultural and social space in which we were asking ourselves all of these questions, but I really do think that if we had pushed through, we could have made a viable business out of this. If we had all felt the focus and the passion to do it, we could have done it. I honestly believe that.
MC: I think I, personally, was having some difficulty with my role within the business because it didn’t seem easily monetized. It was this whole combination of learning about myself, and also learning about myself within the context of a worker cooperative, and learning how my contributions translate within an economic model. I think I was having a hard time syncing the writing, research, and events that we were doing as friends of light with the making and selling of the jackets. I often felt this need to do something more practical within the business in order to make a living from it.
PG: But you were our top back strap weaver.
MC: I know [laughs]. Yeah, but I think it’s all related to this feeling that in order to be a business, there needs to be some efficiency, there needs to be some practicality, some focus. A worker cooperative is this interesting territory where you’re trying to balance our current ‘race to the bottom’ system against a worker-owned and operated system where individuals have an equal stake and, ideally, can contribute from their individual strengths. That, for me, was really important and interesting territory to navigate, but it was difficult to figure out how, and whether, the writing, research, and events could feasibly be supported within our business model.
PG: I also think that structuring ourselves as a worker cooperative was a desire and an idea, but I don’t know how realistic it was as an actual business, also with all of our personal ambitions or ideas. I believe that most of all, it was a space for learning and for exploration, and maybe we didn’t – or I didn’t – fully acknowledge that when we were together. I still feel conflicted about being a business. Jessi?
JH: Yeah, I think that if someone were to try and replicate friends of light with their own project using similar value systems, and similar ways of relating to each other, and similar business structures, it could be very successful. I think for us – but I’ll really speak just for myself – this was a learning experience and was almost an experiment. I think the conflict between, ‘Is this a business? Is this not a business?’ for me comes from living in the capitalist society that I live in and having these preconceived ideas about what a business is. Something I’m really proud of that we did with friends of light is we really flipped a lot of those ideas on their head. I realize now, while I’m running my own business, there are a lot of things that I take from friends of light as far as my hiring practices and my material sourcing and the ways that I interact with people. I’m so conscious of how I speak to the people who work for me to make sure that my role as owner or boss is not painful for anyone, thinking about workers as equal participants, and really having conversations with people within the workplace. I know, personally, that I’ve been able to take all of those things and bring them into a system that I don’t think typically values that type of interaction.
So, I would definitely say that I think this is something that could succeed by all metrics of success, and I do think it was successful by many metrics for us already. Maybe we can continue on this thread – since I mentioned what it is that I have brought from friends of light into my current working situation, is there anything that the two of you can point to that you’ve brought from friends of light into the way you work now?
MC: Well, this tremendous liberation that came from starting to weave by feel and intuition, using materials at hand, using simple frame looms. Weaving is a process that can require so much knowledge, so much planning, and our way of working really opened things up for me in a big way, in terms of finding a feeling of spontaneity in what can be a very calculated process. I really relished and loved our experimental phases – the testing, the questions, and then the pursuit and development of material answers. Like this question about weaving to form, like this question about combining flax and wool to make a combination yarn that we explored with Justin Squizzaro. Those questions have been tremendously important to me, and I certainly learned a lot from working collaboratively and working through the Worker Cooperative Academy in terms of understanding myself as a participant and a contributor, and kind of leveling off this drive towards individuality that I had internalized through my education and work experiences thus far under the auspices of success, and opportunity, and merit.
PG: Yes, I see friends of light in a continuum of learning experiences, along with Work Circles, about collective ways of being in the world. Friends of light was certainly about that, but I think what it brought me most was the connection with nature, with natural fibers, with farming and agriculture, and also the interaction between the individual and the collective, between personal desires and needs and collective ones. That continues to be interesting to me and that’s something that we’re actively engaging at the Master Practice Held in Common that I created here at ArtEZ in Arnhem, the Netherlands. And, of course, the Linen Project that I initiated in 2018 is also a direct outcome of friends of light – we were so excited to work with linen fibers of TapRoot Farms in our second series of jackets.
With the Linen Project we grow flax with local biodynamic farmers and our objective is to bring back small scale linen production to the Netherlands. This has been an amazing process. This year we started a Shared Stewardship initiative in which thirty people participate to steward and care for the cultivation of half an acre of flax. In that process we do everything by hand from growing the flax, weeding, harvesting, processing the flax into fiber, and then the fibers into yarns and textiles. I really enjoy going through these processes together while learning about collectivity and community – how can we engage in collective leadership by embracing individual passions and needs?
I feel very grateful for everything we learned and did in friends of light. For me personally, it’s about understanding deeply the conditioning that we have integrated from growing up in this society. We have learned to secure our individual well-being and success always from the perspective of scarcity and competition because of the assumption that only one of us can be truly successful. But how do we understand ourselves as interdependent? How can we start to understand and act from the awareness that the well-being of the collective and our personal well-being are one and the same?
Jessi owns a dye production facility and textile fabrication studio in Brooklyn, NY, where she creates small samples as well as larger scale production for her clients in the fashion, interiors, and film industries.
www.jessihighet.com
Mae continues to research, write about, and experiment with textiles, and works as studio manager for tapestry artist Helena Hernmarck. She documents her activities on her website, and is evolving her weaving practice at her studio in Newburgh, NY.
www.maecolburn.info
Pascale is head of the Master Practice Held in Common at ArtEZ in Arnhem, the Netherlands, where she established the Linen Project, a practice-based research environment initiated by ArtEZ MA Practice Held in Common and Crafts Council Netherlands.
www.practiceheldincommon.nl
www.practiceheldincommon.nl/the-linen-project