The Embodied Practice of Weaving: an Interview with Jessica Fern Facette

November 6, 2025

A full room of supporters crowded into the Alberta Craft Council’s Edmonton gallery on a hot afternoon in late May for Jessica Fern Facette’s opening of Symptomatology, an exhibition of weavings and textiles. I recognized a few people from workshops and drop-in weaving sessions I’ve attended at her studio, Fern’s School of Textile Craft. The opening made visible the impact she has had on the creative community in Edmonton, and this was an opportunity to see and celebrate her own work.

I started taking weaving classes with Fern at the end of 2023 and was instantly taken by her approach to knowledge sharing. Centred around completing a particular project (such as a rug or a blanket), workshops at Fern’s introduce participants to new skills in ways that ensure them the joy of successful completion. In just a few hours or days, anyone new to weaving can leave the studio with a completed piece and the desire to keep making and learning more. It’s an approach to making that really appeals to my artistic sensibility. After all, as artists we often find ourselves learning new skills to materialize an idea. Having an end goal in mind without knowing exactly how to get there is often part of the fun.

Having witnessed Fern’s approach to pedagogy, how she shares and plans as a part of teaching others, Symptomatology was an opportunity to see projects that had been imagined and materialized by Fern herself—a glimpse into her own imagination and process. Weaving is a craft that is tens of thousands of years old, with what often feels like a million possibilities of potential—as Fern notes in our discussion, it is incredible to think of the complexity afforded by working with the seemingly simple material of string. Each practitioner uniquely approaches the craft, and looking closer can give insight into the weaver’s process and practice.

I was really taken by how delicate and sculptural the works in the exhibition were—colourful tubes turning in on themselves and two-sided double weave panels revealing the invisible elements we usually aren’t privy to with woven tapestries. Colour, geometry, and pattern are central to this new body of work, along with the delicate nature of three-dimensionality. The images formed through the act of weaving evoke colourful shapes reminiscent of graphs, prompting us to wonder more about the information or data behind each pattern’s renderings. The graphs aren’t linear representations, though; they often twist and turn as if they have a life of their own and as if they, too, are continually trying to make sense of what they represent. The weavings have a mysterious sensibility about them and spending time with the work, it becomes clearer that the information shaping the colourful blocks and patterns represents Fern’s unique approach to thinking and planning—and by extension the act of weaving itself. If you dig deeper into the principles and mechanics of weaving, the works have a sense of impossibility about them as two-layers are woven simultaneously. The interweaving of threads across the top and bottom layers of cloth invites viewers to continually move from one to the other. This active shifting of perspective, between the surface and verso of the hanging panels, makes the focus that Fern applies to her craft tangible, and offers visual evidence of the thinking required when weaving. I wanted to know more about Fern’s approach to weaving and the ways she considers it an embodied practice that calls forth a unique sense of focus.

We sat down in Fern’s studio one afternoon in early fall to chat more about her approach to the process. While we chatted, Fern was tying the fringes of a recently woven blue and white rug, offering a hands-on glimpse into how the repetitive nature of weaving can help to focus one’s attention.

Christina Battle (CB): I’d love to know more about how you got into weaving. At the opening of your exhibition at the Alberta Craft Council you acknowledged a woman who was in attendance who had introduced you to the craft. I was so interested in that and thinking about the opening as this sort of full-circle of your weaving life.

Fern Facette (FF): Yeah! There were two women at the opening who were really integral—really present—when I was just getting into weaving. My friend Leila, who was my peer, we both went to NAIT and took the photography program there together. We were both really into knitting and we would just hang out and knit and lay around in the park and play crib, like you do when you’re 20 and you have a totally different relationship to time.

CB: Haha! Yeah.

FF: We were knitting buds, and she invited me to take a weaving class with her at the Edmonton Weavers’ Guild. And I was like What is weaving? I had no idea. So, the Edmonton Weavers’ Guild was my introduction to it—that was in 2001—and the lady who taught us at that workshop also briefly came to the exhibition opening. It was so great that they were both there.

CB: Oh, wow, 24 years ago! Amazing. Did you dive right into weaving from that moment?

FF: Oddly enough, soon after, my dad saw a loom for sale in the bargain finder and he bought it for me. And I really loved it. I loved the class, and it was super interesting—maybe a little bit intimidating—but I’m not sure I would have gotten into weaving as much if my dad hadn’t gone and got that loom. At the time I was living with my grandma, and it was set up in her basement, and I think having the tool gave that instant accessibility to keep at it. From there it was a lot of trial and error trying to figure things out, like how to make a warp and how to dress the loom.

CB: It’s one of those mediums where you don’t necessarily need a lot of tools, but the complexity of a project can increase if you have a floor loom. I’m thinking about how, without the loom, maybe you wouldn’t have been spending so much time thinking about patterns and particular types of projects with weaving.

FF: I don’t think I would have thought about it at all, really. I think without the loom, it just would have seemed, I don’t know, maybe a little bit futile, because I didn’t have money to buy a loom, so I’m not sure I would have spent a whole lot of time pursuing it—even just as an idea of it—without having the tool.

CB: And at that time in Edmonton, do you have a sense of how other people who were weaving at that time were doing it? Did they also all have their own looms?

FF: At that time I was a total anomaly within the guild, I was by far the youngest person there, and they’re weren’t really a whole lot of online resources, the only way for learning was classes at the guild or from books.

CB: And then presumably, being a part of those classes, you’d get to know people and maybe a sort of community formed?

FF: Totally, yes. The guild had meetup groups and things like that, which I joined for a while, but then I found that it was a whole lot of socializing and not a whole lot of weaving. So, I don’t think I really learned a lot. But the guild helped me connect to a mentor and that really accelerated my learning. I really wanted a weaving mentor so I asked the guild to send out a blanket email to the membership for me—and nobody responded! Nobody wanted to take on that role. But someone did say, Well, there’s this woman named Kathy who runs a weaving group at a senior centre, maybe she would be looking for someone to help her. And sure enough, she was. She kind of became my unofficial mentor, and I really did learn so much from her. Actually, I think that is something that really built up my skill level as a weaver and built up my confidence, because it ran kind of similar to how Fern’s School of Textile Craft runs. She would imagine a project, draft it all out on the software program, give me some fibre, and get me to make the warp and dress the looms. At our peak we had maybe 14 seniors who would come in and weave every Wednesday.

CB: That’s amazing.

FF: Yeah. I really did learn a lot from her. She’s an amazing weaver who, at the time, was in her 80s and had been weaving for over 50 years.

CB: Wow.

FF: She had a wealth of knowledge and was also very rigid. Very like: there’s only one way to do a thing and if you make a mistake you have to weave backwards to fix it. It didn’t matter how far back the mistake was, she was very, very particular.

CB: She was focused on the craft and the artisanship of weaving.

FF: Yeah. I can’t remember what it was that made me desire a mentor, but I think it was because at the time, there were such a lack of places to learn. I’m not sure where the idea sparked from, but it was a huge influence for me. I learned so much and I really can look back at that time and see how much my weaving changed while I was working with Kathy. She had so much information and so much experience, and it was learning in a really hands-on way.

CB: Learning through practice, but for a purpose.

FF: Yeah, yeah.

CB: I was also curious to know more about your studying at Olds College, especially since it was announced that the program won’t be continuing. When did you start taking classes there?

FF: I did my first year there in 2014, maybe right around the time I started volunteering at that senior centre with Kathy. Looking back, I must have been really thirsty for learning. The first year of that program really helped me contextualize a lot of the bigger concepts in weaving that hadn’t clicked into place before, so that was really cool.

CB: What do you mean by bigger concepts?

FF: Things like sett.¹ There’s an assignment where you weave a bunch of different cloth using one warp, manipulating your sett and how close together or far apart your fibres are, and taking it to those two extremes from warp faced to weft faced.²

CB: Kind of like pushing the limits of the medium itself and showing you how you can do different things.

FF: Yeah, exploring that concept of sett and taking this giant thing that has so many variables and putting it in order, or putting it into categories and simplifying it. Demystifying this gigantic concept that is thousands of years old and can go off infinitely in so many different directions. Just breaking that down into some really core concepts.

“It almost feels like, I don’t know, with just string, it shouldn’t have so many possibilities, but it really does. Even just the simplest project like a plain weave, a piece of cloth.”

CB: I’m thinking about how having that understanding is really important in weaving because otherwise, it is really difficult to imagine what you could make or want to end up with—because it truly is an infinite medium, which is bonkers to me, actually. I mean, other mediums are too, in their own ways. But there’s something about weaving, there are just so many different decisions and tangents you make along the way that lead to the end thing.

FF: It’s true. It almost feels like, I don’t know, with just string, it shouldn’t have so many possibilities, but it really does. Even just the simplest project like a plain weave, a piece of cloth.

CB: Yeah, even just by changing colours, it’s infinite. At Olds was there more of a sense of community among your classmates? Were you all sort of traveling through classes together?

FF: More or less. Each year was one week-long program where you cover your course load, do a lot of book learning and hands-on practical weaving of samples. Then you go home with about 100 hours of self-directed assignments to complete. You do the work over the course of the year and then move on to the next level the following year. It’s a five-year program, and by the end of the fourth year, you’re officially considered an Artisan. Then, once you finish your fifth year, you’re officially a Master. I have completed the four levels over the course of about 10 years, because, you know—life—I took my time. But now that the program is winding down, if I want to finish level five, I probably have to do it in the next year or two.

CB: Do you have a sense of how your work has changed across this expanded time of learning? When you started weaving at that first Edmonton Weavers’ Guild workshop, through to the work that you’ve made recently, has the work shifted a lot? When you were talking about working with your mentor, was it a time that fueled the way you thought about what you could make yourself artistically?

FF: Actually, I think at that time I was probably making quite a lot of stuff, because my main work was as a wedding photographer and it was very seasonal. I was a photographer in the summer and then would just weave all winter.

CB: Amazing. That makes so much sense, actually.

FF: Yeah, it was great. Also, I wasn’t teaching at that time, so I would just make stuff. I think things really shifted after gaining a mentor. Another shift was signing up to do a market and that pressure of having to fill a table with work of a decent quality really kicked things into a whole new gear for me as well. That pressure to make a lot of stuff and to have it be of a certain quality to justify the price—because weaving takes so long you have to charge a lot of money for it, otherwise you’re just giving it away, right? I think that really was a shift as well in terms of my own practice.

CB: Let’s talk a bit about the work in your recent exhibition Symptomatology, at the Alberta Craft Council (May 31 – July 12, 2025). You’ve spoken about how the work was instigated while doing a residency at Yorath House alongside artist and musician Matthew Cardinal in 2022, and how important the playfulness of that residency was. How, the moment when you placed the woven tubes (inspired by Matthew’s sound cables) on your head was a moment of clarity about the brain-work connections that happen during the weaving process.³ Can you speak a bit more about your approach to thinking about weaving as an embodied practice?

FF: I love the process of weaving and how sitting down at a loom demands that you block out all the distractions and really focus. That was the main thing that I always enjoyed about weaving even before I realized that it was helping to regulate my nervous system and that was what I was actually responding to.

I was learning about bilateral brain stimulation, as I was learning more about my recent ADHD diagnosis. Bilateral brain stimulation is basically any activity where you’re rhythmically alternating movements between the left and right sides of your body. Even just tapping your left hand and then your right hand repeatedly engages both hemispheres of your brain, which helps fire up your parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your brain that is responsible for rest, digestion, processing information and memories and all of that stuff. The exercises are used in therapies like EMDR. I saw a video of an exercise to help with focusing where you tap your left hand and then your right hand and then start moving your feet along with your hands and then your eyes. And I was like, this is weaving! Weaving involves your full body: your eyes, your ears, your hands, your legs. It’s like a full body, bilateral brain exercise, which is really good for engaging that part of your brain and can help you focus. The process of weaving is such a therapeutic, focus-driven thing. I see it in my students, too. When I’m teaching classes, I have to remind them over and over: please stop and take a break to eat!

CB: It’s almost like you’re not even thinking about the end goal in a way, because you’re just so in the process. What was the timing of you seeing that video and then recognizing the conceptual framework of the work in the Symptomatology exhibition, which really is work that illustrates or visualizes that process. Was it a deliberate choice of wanting to make work that translates those ideas and those concepts into physical form?

FF: It wasn’t a fully formed understanding until maybe about halfway through weaving for the exhibition. But I knew that regulation was happening in my brain and in my body and I wanted to understand it more. I learned more about bilateral brain stimulation and that’s when I had the AHA moment of, Wow, this is entirely related to the act of weaving. It gave me that deeper understanding of some of the things that were happening under the surface of the work.

CB: I love that as viewers we can see it in the work because that’s what the work does, right? The work itself is the process being visualized. I’m thinking especially about the double weave panels and how they show that part of the process that is actually quite invisible during making.⁴ By highlighting the back side of the panels, the works share the evidence of thinking through required when you were making them. I’m really taken by the focus that was required of you to weave in this way. Can you share a bit about what the act of weaving was like for this new work?⁵ Did you spend a lot of time weaving this work at home or in the studio?

FF: It was really just practicality that dictated where I was weaving. I had a loom at home that I was weaving tubes on, and then I had a loom here in the studio where I was weaving the panel pieces. It wasn’t a deliberate choice. It just happened to be like, Well, this loom is there and that loom is there. It was really nice, because sometimes when I’m here in the studio, I’ll have downtime if I’m teaching a class and people are working on their own for a couple hours or if I’m supporting another teacher’s class and I have nothing to do, then I would just weave the whole time for myself.

CB: Thinking about weaving always gets me thinking about time, and you’re also considering the relationship of time to the setup of the tools themselves, because each loom is set up differently with different goals.

FF: Yeah, the two looms were set up for totally different things but the actual weaving was pretty similar: pretty slow and repetitive. I think one thing that was really important was having the space to spread out. When I was sculpting some of the larger pieces, having all of these tables here at the studio and being able to spread out made a difference. I couldn’t have done that at home, and if I did, everything would have been covered in pet hair.

CB: Real life kicking in! Did you have an idea of what the sculptural elements would look like from the start, even before the warps were planned and the looms were dressed?

FF: Yeah, I had pretty strong ideas about what those were going to look like. That’s one thing that I really learned to love about grant writing—because I chose to write a grant for the work, I had already planned everything out. I had done all of that legwork to figure out what the pieces were going to be, down to what size, how much fibre and how many inches of tube I needed. It was really just going into production mode. The ideas and the work had already been conceptualized and imagined; it just had to be made.

CB: I suppose weaving lends itself to that methodology really. Needing to know from the start what you’re going to end up with, and having all of the calculations and math and things figured out in order to plan your materials. Do you often use grant writing in that way to help sort things out? Or was that a first with this project?

FF: That was a first for myself. When Fatme and I started collaborating, it was kind of similar.⁶ We started with a small idea, and then we were like, Well, if we’re writing a grant we might as well not just weave one thing, let’s weave four things and make it a year-long project.⁷

“I think it is also because people are getting real satisfaction by disconnecting from screens, also, touching natural fibre is especially exciting as that becomes less common.”

CB: I want to spend more time talking about the School of Textile Craft later in the season, but I did want to ask you about something I feel like I’m seeing right now across the city (and in the arts more broadly, perhaps)—a renewed interest in weaving. We’re in a moment where artists are looking to craft and textiles, and are interested in working with fibre. I especially sense it here in Edmonton. A lot of that is thanks to you and your workshops and the artist residency that you offer, and the other spaces that are popping up and supporting the community to learn these skills. Does that feel true to you too? From your first days of going to the Edmonton Weavers’ Guild to now, do you feel like there’s a difference?

FF: I think there’s been a big shift. When I was initially at the guild, I was really the only person under 30 that was weaving as a member. Whereas now, I feel like there’s a lot more general interest in weaving. I’m sure it’s because of so many things, but I think a big part of it is accessibility. There are just so many ways to learn now. There are lots of classes that you can take here in the city and a saturation of things on the internet. You can look it up and be instantly inspired by so many weavers. But I think it is also because people are getting real satisfaction by disconnecting from screens, also, touching natural fibre is especially exciting as that becomes less common. I think, for whatever reason, in the art world people in positions of power in galleries are more accepting of it as an art form right now.

CB: Yeah, valuing it more. I mean, it’s not new to have textile works and weavings in museums and galleries by any stretch. Maybe there is also an interest in remembering what has always been here but has somehow been separated or somehow not been valued in the same way.

FF: I don’t know, but I always think that the turning away was because it was sort of forced upon women, generally, as this thing that you should be doing. When you think of schools like the Bauhaus in Germany, that’s what created some of the most iconic weavers.⁸ Those women were largely denied going into other areas like architecture and sculpture, were really pushed into the realm of fibre arts, and told: This is your domain, this is where you should stay.

CB: And maybe the generation now is coming back to embracing it. When you were talking about the focus and the bodily experience of weaving, I was thinking that also does feel very contemporary to me. Wanting to just focus and not have to…you know, things aren’t so great these days, and I think especially younger generations probably really feel that. Being able to hone in and focus on something that’s in tune with your body and gets you thinking about time differently is of great value.

FF: Yeah, and as that kind of experience becomes less common for someone like myself, I would think there is almost a sense of nostalgia for it, because we grew up without screens in our face 24/7.

CB: Yeah.

FF: There’s that connection to it as something from our younger days, but imagine being a 20-year-old right now, growing up with screens as such a constant in your life. It would be totally amazing to experience something that pulls you away from all that.

Later in the year, Fern and I will meet again to speak more about her collaborative projects and the role of her studio in the broader community.

Symptomatology is Jessica Fern Facette’s (Fern, she/her) debut solo exhibit of a two decade weaving practice. Using double weave, Fern explores the intersection of weaving and ADHD.

Symptomatology was created using double weave, a technique in which two separate layers of cloth are woven simultaneously. Fern’s handwoven tubes are referential to the weavers’ material, magnifying and exposing its structure in varied states and scales. Panels of double weave pick-up utilize block shapes in primary hues to reference childhood, learning and information processing.

Jessica Fern Facette is an artist based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has initiated growth in the textile community by founding Fern’s School of Craft, a space where fibre artists share knowledge. Fern is passionate about reducing barriers to craft through volunteerism, long-term mentorship and collaboration. Her work in correctional facilities and the creation of a fully funded artist residency has introduced textiles to a diverse number of local artists.

Christina Battle is an artist, curator, and writer based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Her practice focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: its complexity, and the intricacies entwined within it. She looks to disaster as a series of intersecting processes including social, environmental, cultural, political, and economic, which are implicated not only in how disaster is caused but also in how it manifests, is responded to, and overcome. Battle’s practice prioritizes collaboration, experimentation, and failure; she has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries as both artist and curator. www.cbattle.com.

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Footnotes:

1
Sett is also referred to as “ends per inch” (EPI), it measures the number of warp threads spaced within one inch and affects the fabric’s density and texture.
2
The warp is the set of fibres dressed vertically on the loom that support the underlying structure of a weave, while the weft are those threads passed along the warp from left to right by the weaver. In a warp faced weaving, the vertical warp threads are more prominent, in a weft-faced, the horizontal weft threads dominate the weave.
3
During the exhibition, Fern posted a series of Instagram reels outlining her approach to the work (video by Morgan Pinnock). Check out this video to learn more about her process.
4
I asked Fern to help describe the double weave method: “One warp is used to create two layers of cloth. The layers can be separate, joined at one side (double width), or exchanged to form a joined cloth, which is what I did (double weave pick-up).”
5
During the exhibition, Fern posted a series of Instagram reels sharing knowledge about her weaving process (video by Morgan Pinnock). Check out this video to learn more about the double weave pickup method.
6
Since 2020, Fern and Fatme Elkadry have collaborated as Weaving to Reclaim. The collaboration sees the two explore and Fern support Fatme in the creation of traditional woven Palestinian textiles. You can learn more about their project in this 2022 interview in Art from Here.
7
Look forward to reading more about Weaving to Reclaim later in COI’s first season.
8
Bauhaus was an early 20th century art school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts (from 1919 to 1933). The school was progressive for the time and enrolled women who were not afforded the opportunity to enroll in traditional art institutions. The early years, though, still only afforded women to enroll in the “Women’s Section” of the school which primarily centered on weaving workshops. Artists like Anni Albers and Marli Ehrman left the program when it closed in the early 1930s (due to pressure by the Nazi regime) later becoming pivotal educators in the USA at the Black Mountain College (Albers) and what later became the Institute of Design in Chicago (Ehrman) profoundly influencing generations of contemporary artists. The 2020 exhibition “Weaving Beyond the Bauhaus” at the Art Institute of Chicago explores some of this rich history.