Wisconsin Life

Marianne Fairbanks has two degrees in fiber arts. I call myself a textile nerd. She's also an assistant professor of textiles and design.

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Any solutions? I love teaching this because everyone has a relationship to cloth. There are some that say like, "It's the first thing you touch as a baby." You're wrapped in a blanket. Every culture weaves. Every culture dyes. Every culture creates clothing to sort of shelter themselves. And she's also on to something. I love the technical detail. I mean weaving is like tons of math and tons of, sort of intensive labor that pays off in a very amazing way. Yes, yes. So when it all works out, you get this piece of cloth in the end. It's like magic. The magic starts by learning how to use 200-year-old technology called a loom. You look around at these floor looms and you think, "Where were those?" Mostly they were in women's homes and they were using them to weave placemats and curtains and things for their home. I always make them weave on the floor loom first, because I think there's a physicality that comes with warping the loom that's really important for them to understand before we move to the digital. Everyone thinks digital loom, computer loom. They think you push a button and zip, zip, zip, it just weaves. Mm-mm. The thing that makes that loom amazing is that you actually still are hand weaving it with this digital technology. Even though there's 1,760 threads, I can say I want the third one to lift. I want the twelfth one to lift. So you can tell it what to do. I find it to be a really amazing tool in that way. And I feel like I'm just starting to scratch the surface. Marianne is just scratching the surface but she hopes to inspire her students to carve a path into the science of style. Part of me is training the next designers who are going to make the clothing that you wear or the curtains that we buy for our homes. But at the same time how can we push towards the future in a high-tech way or smart textiles? Marianne is on the cutting edge of eco-friendly solution-based design. She's trying to crack the code of renewable energy, making it accessible and weaving it into our everyday lives. This is what we came up with. Around 2003, Marianne infused art with a flexible solar panel to create a hand bag that could harness the sun's energy to recharge cellphones or other small electronics. We showed it around a bit and people said, "Well, where can I buy one?" We were like, "What do you mean? This is just an idea. This is just a prototype." We didn't invent the solar. We didn't invent, you know handbag, for heaven's sake, but we invented the way this particular thing was configured. The sustainable solar bags were sold in more than 30 stores across the United States and Canada, but proved to be a bit ahead of its time. You know, by the time the business ended in 2010, in the back of my mind I'd always wished, "I wish I didn't have to design around this panel." When Marianne came to the University of Wisconsin, she met a chemist named Trisha Andrews. So when I first approached Trisha, she had made a solar cell on a piece of paper. And as a textile person, you think, "Well, paper's actually quite similar to a textile." Ever the entrepreneur, Marianne's new idea was to make a weave so the solar cells and fabric become one. I was really nervous that at that point she'd think I was crazy. There's no way. I thought that was brilliant. That is awesome. I could never conceive that 'cause I don't know how to weave things. I could barely pickle a cucumber. The perspective of a scientist, they're always asking questions. They're always inquiring. They're reaching and striving for the next new thing. I think that's the way that we approach art in so many senses is I'm looking to innovation. There's no one out there. There's no designer basically working with a device person trying to do this. That's us, and that's what really excited me. Once Marianne threaded that needle, the possibilities just kept coming. Well, let's say someone needs to charge tons of batteries in the military or at a refugee camp. Here's your bolt of cloth. Unfurl it on the field. And all of a sudden, you have a very light-weight immediate power source. Your running outfit is collecting it and then reflecting out later when you're running in the dark. The heated glove potential is actually just out of part of the research. I love the idea of it being on the tops of umbrellas. The sun umbrella becomes your battery charging source for your small electronic. I mean let's face it. Our demand for energy isn't going to go away. The scientist and the artist are working toward finalizing their design for a solar textile. I think that smart textiles are just gonna go through the roof in the next 10 years to be honest. I want to be prepared for that as a program. I want to be on the forefront of that and have my students thinking about that. I guess at the end of the day it's about innovation. As an artist, I'm always searching to produce something new. I would say as a collaborator, that's the same. I want to put something new into the world. So whether it's art or practical like the solar textiles, I'm searching for the next new thing.