APPRENTICESHIP SUMMARY

This fiber-based apprenticeship will focus on apprentice artist Katherine Ferrier’s goals to expand her natural dyeing and spinning skills, while learning to weave on a four-harness floor loom with mentor artist, Sarah Haskell. She will accomplish this through 100 hours of guidance, reflection and training spent together with Sarah in-studio, as they delve further into their common connection of text & textiles. This will ultimately give Katherine a deeper confidence in her own voice as a fiber artist and poet.

MENTOR

Sarah Haskell (York, ME)

Born and raised in New England, Sarah has a BFA in Textile Design from RISD and a Masters of Art and Healing from Wisdom University. As a seeker, maker and creative pathfinder her medium is most often thread, investigating the mystery of encoded fabrics and the hidden language of cloth.

Sarah has exhibited in regional and national shows at The September 11th Memorial and Museum, NYC, NY; The Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA; Museum Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX ; Artists’ Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland ME; The Providence Art Club, Providence, RI; The Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, The Wichita Center for the Arts, Wichita, KA, New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford, MA, Speedwell Projects, Portland ME, and Maine Fiber Art Gallery, Topsham, ME. Sarah is a four time finalist for the Greater Piscataqua Charitable Foundation. She is a 2021 Fellow for the Maine Arts Commission.

Artist residencies include Monhegan Island, ME; Hewnoaks, Lovell, ME; Vermont Studio Center, Peters Valley Crafts Center, Layton, NJ; Acadia National Park, ME, Hambidge Center, Rabun, GA, Monson Arts, Monson, ME
White Island, Isle of Shoals, Rye, NH

In 2002 she completed “Each One: The Button Project, a 9/11 Memorial” her first community art project, owned by the City of Portsmouth, NH. Her global peace project “Woven Voices, Messages from the Heart” concluded in 2012 after four years of successfully weaving community, peace and creative expression. Her latest community art project, “Well Used, Well Loved” (2015- 17) explored age, beauty, attachment and impermanence using a handwoven dishtowel and reflective writing.

“I have admired Katherine’s work via Instagram for over two years. We met in person to explore the possibility of working together and the connection was instant and honest. Over the weeks of working on this application we have uncovered our common love for the intersection of text and textiles – of metaphor and encoded or embedded language in hand woven cloth and embroidery. This shared passion has nurtured the idea of collaborating on projects once the apprenticeship concludes.“ – Sarah Haskell

APPRENTICE

Katherine Ferrier (Rockland, ME)

Katherine Ferrier is a queer poet, dancer, textile artist, teacher, and community organizer based in Rockland, Maine. Her research grows out of a deep practice of paying poetic attention to the world, and lives in the intersecting communities of movers, makers, writers and activists.

Before living in Maine, she spent eight years in the White Mountains of NH, where she created and directed an international dance festival, managed an art gallery, designed innovative business trainings for artists, and taught a monthly ekphrastic writing workshop in galleries, inspired by the changing art exhibits.

Since 2018, Katherine has directed the Medomak Fiberarts Retreat in Washington, ME, a nationally recognized gathering of fiber artists from around the world, where she teaches improvisational patchwork, slow stitching, wet felting, and writing for makers. Her work has been featured in Uppercase Magazine, The Knot, Contact Quarterly, and several poetry anthologies, including A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, and Katherine self-published a collection of photographs and poems about making, called Thread Says Stay. She has recently shown her textile work at Speedwell Projects in Portland and at The Ice House Gallery on North Haven. She earned her B.A. in Dance/Women’s Studies from Middlebury, and M.F.A. in Dance from Sarah Lawrence. She regularly teaches and performs throughout the US and abroad, and believes in patchwork as the radical practice of being patient, saying yes, and making space for everyone at the table.

“To say I admire Sarah’s work is an understatement. I discovered her work long before I knew about the CAP program, and have been following her on social media for over 5 years. The depth and breadth of her practice is an absolute inspiration. I’m particularly drawn to how she works with text and image, stitching into cloth she has dyed and woven. Her work brings together so many of my own loves: text and textiles, sky and sea, contemplation and community. I can’t wait to learn from her..” – Katherine Ferrier