WERT: Interspecies Weaving and Becoming

Carol Padberg is an artist, writer, educator and founding director of the Nomad MFA. Padberg has an art and ecology studio where she weaves with living oyster mushrooms, using yarn that is colored by plants from her back yard dye garden. She uses regenerative agricultural strategies to maintain a city micro-farm called Nook Farm House. She is an herbalist and witch, and sells homemade herbal remedies that she crafts from cultivated and foraged herbs. Her art practice includes making textiles with living organisms, creating drawings with homemade inks, and raising sheep for the homespun yarn that she makes to use in her multispecies weavings. Her art has been the subject of exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Her initiatives have been featured at the Walker Art Center, MoMA, and the Creative Time Summit at the Venice Biennale. Recent papers and presentations have been featured in the Social Theory in Art Education Journal; the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts Quarterly; STREAMS: Transformative Environmental Humanities, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Stockholm; the InSEA European Congress, Aalto University; the Multispecies Storytelling Conference, Linnæus University; and Imaginative Futures: Arts Based Research as Boundary Event Symposium, Arizona State University.