What's It Like To Farm Fabric And Allow Textiles To Tell A Story?

I wish to celebrate with all of you Adele’s unusual combination of courage, talent, skill and heart that she has used to weave these straw-colored yarns (that I bred and grew over decades in different landscapes) into golden cloths that shimmer with story and place and a tender sort of love from and of our ephemeral glittering living world.” SALLY FOX, FOX FIBRE.

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Standing in a field of naturally colored cotton under a midday blazing sun, Adele Stafford was introduced to both a magical crop and the harrowing story of the farmer who’d spent thirty years fighting to cultivate and grow it, going up against an increasingly powerful industrial agriculture community, shifting political policy and the final collapse of our domestic textile economy.

This meeting became the focus of her work as a hand weaver and a platform for her project, Voices of Industry, where she creates hand-woven textiles and apparel from 100% domestic fibre, farmed and spun in the United States. Voices of Industry invests in the independent farmer, the biodynamic alchemist, and the punk rock shepherdess, producing small collections of work that reflect the fibre’s true, and often gritty, agricultural story.

Adele returned to being a maker and an artist after fifteen years of working in a business strategy role for a variety of creative organizations including frog design and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Adele received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Business Administration from Simmons College.