Rebecca Burgess

The systemic failures brought to light by the pandemic have created an uptick of interest in the same local supply chains Mendocino Wool and Fiber Inc. is helping to build. The world — at least a portion of it — seems to be learning along with the Gilberts.

The Nature of Fashion’s bold and necessary lens for holistic material analysis is not fully applied to the proposed vision for increasing fiber production through the expansion of “biosynthetics” via fermentation of microorganisms, including genetically engineered microorganisms.

The novel Coronavirus disease Covid-19 is amplifying both the ways that our cultural and economic lives are durable and resilient, and the many, many ways in which we are utterly vulnerable and precarious.

I made a decision: Upon returning home I would upend the way that I had been cultured to consume and wear textiles, and as a function of this change, I would allow myself and my body to become the center of an experiment.

I call this place-based textile system a fibershed. Similar to a local watershed or a foodshed, a fibershed is focused on the source of the raw material, the transparency with which it is converted into clothing, and the connectivity among all parts, from soil to skin and back to soil.

Harvesting Liberty is a film that captures a story of a vision made manifest, a creation process that somehow made it through the veritable tsunami-like conditions created from the aftermath of the changing of antiquated laws, and the tour de force of promises brought forth by many-a-businessmen that followed this political change.