Ahnalee Brincks Weaves Together Experimentation and Community Connection

Just before the Covid-19 pandemic brought our world to a halt, I took a one-day weaving class at my local yarn shop. The next day I bought a loom. Though an experienced knitter, it was a somewhat impulsive purchase to quell curiosities I had about the art. Little did I know the pandemic would soon provide a lot of time to experiment. What I didn’t anticipate was how challenging it would be to do that experimentation without access to support from a community of fellow weavers.

The following year, I joined the STEM Ambassador Program (STEMAP) at Michigan State University. As a prevention scientist I assumed my STEMAP project would involve engaging with parenting communities given my previous work with family-based prevention programs. After working with our STEMAP facilitators to map overlapping areas of my scientific and personal identity I began to see the importance the intersection of art and science had for me. Thinking back to the artistic isolation I felt during the pandemic, I reached out to a local weaving guild that meets at the senior center in a nearby town. Certainly, this would be a novel setting in which to discuss science. Rather than a community of parents, I found myself quickly immersed in a community of weavers.

In my initial meeting with the guild’s leadership, we talked about the STEMAP program and explored the possibility of collaborating on a STEM-focused activity. But we spent most of the hour talking about weaving, how our interests overlapped, and the weaving guild’s past, present, and future. Despite a Facebook page and monthly newsletter, from the outside the guild didn’t look very active. But after attending a couple of meetings, I learned it’s a community teeming with energy and enthusiasm for the art of weaving, a host of other fiber arts, and importantly, each other.

Over several months of meetings, one thing I heard repeatedly from members, and knew for myself, was how difficult it was to document weaving projects. But as scientists, we excel at this!  I proposed a future guild meeting focused on strategies for documentation. The meeting format was simple: I gave a brief presentation on how scientists approach documentation throughout the experimental process (including examples of lab notebooks) and in the dissemination of our findings. I then presented a variety of ways I saw the global weaving community documenting and disseminating art from individual weaving notebooks to written patterns to social media sites like Instagram and Ravelry. The bulk of our time together was in a show-and-tell format, consistent with other guild meetings. Experienced weavers brought enormous notebooks full of project notes and weaving samples, others shared digital formats they use, and many of us took notes on each other’s methods.  We also talked about the tension we felt between documenting for future projects and preferring to spend our time weaving.

I was primarily interested in moving the group forward in seeing themselves as scientists via experiments at their looms and connecting weaving practices with science practices. I brought a recent weaving experiment from my loom and talked about how I systematically tried various techniques to get the angle of the design to a desired (and measurable!) 45 degrees. Another member talked about how her online documentation through a social-media website elicited other users to contact her with questions about her project notes, beautifully demonstrating overlap with scientific dissemination through publications and conference presentations.

I’ve maintained my membership with the weaving guild for over a year and my own art is thriving in this supportive community. I continue to listen for connections between art and science in our conversations, and at times can’t help but point out the scientific practices that my weaving colleagues are using as they experiment at their looms. We are all artists, and we are all scientists.

I want to acknowledge with deep gratitude the Greater Lansing Weavers Guild for embracing me in their community and collaborating with me on this project.