WESTTOWN ARTIST RESIDENCY PROJECT / 2020

Everything around us is rightly getting rerouted, rescheduled, reoriented. Since we certainly can’t anticipate what life-shapes, let alone artist residencies, will look like in the coming months, the 2020 W.A.R.P. cycle will be a bit different this year: a combination of mail-based, speculative, and materials-based.

In January of this year, TWM received a donation of approximately 500 pounds of partially processed cotton fluff.* We are looking for W.A.R.P. proposals utilizing this cotton material. What can you do with it? What do you want to do with it? What does it want to do with you?

Upon your request, TWM will send you a box of cotton fluff. You, the applicant, will develop material samples, tests, objects, gestures, actions. Document these processes however you see fit: photographs, drawings, text, etc. As you work with this material, consider how your studio experiments could inspire/branch into/become a collaborative project or workshop with the artists of Envision Unlimited. We are unsure how or if this phase of the residency will translate into an in-person residency, but it doesn’t hurt to ruminate on it while you work.

The full submission (due September 15) will include documentation of your cotton work and a few short essay questions, covering your studio work and interests and your ideas as to how your material experiments can inspire a workshop/collaborative project with Westtown artists in the future. This year we are requesting a $15 application fee to cover the costs of shipping cotton to the applicants (waivers available, please email info@theweavingmill.com to request one).

As we are undeniably eager to see what all of you do with this material, we’ll plan on compiling and collecting the work done in this remote phase of the residency for publication, either in zine or web form. We’ll hold off on scheduling in-person residencies until we have a clearer sense of what the next several months hold. If feasible, the selection committee will choose three proposals to proceed with and schedule in-person residency sessions on a case-by-case basis. For now, we’ll start with boxes of cotton fluff sent to interested parties, to do what they will with…

UPDATE: We’ve closed the request window, as we’ve hit 97 participants! If you have received your cotton and are ready to submit your documentation/responses, hit the button below. Can’t wait to see what’s become of all this dispersed fluff.

ANOTHER UPDATE: We’re extending the submission deadline to SEPTEMBER 15.

*The cotton came to us from Notre, who got it from Everybody.world. The cotton is what Everybody.world “lovingly calls ‘trash’ cotton waste, directly from the cotton manufacturing process. It came from a plant in South Carolina. The material is collected when the entire plant shuts down its all of its operations to capture as much material that has been left behind from running the machines. So that is runoff, scraps, pieces left in the machines, anything they can sweep up off the factory floor, etc. If that ‘trash’ material hadn't been shipped to Notre, it would have been run through a thorough cleaning process outlined at the bottom of this page before it can be turned into essentially new cotton” (from correspondence with Notre).