Net-making Laboratory

Come explore net-making as both fiber art and performance practice. Learn the methods and materials used in commercial and recreational fishing along the Gulf Coast, and explore ways to expand on the counting, handwork, postures, rhythms, and gestures of tying knots and weaving that go into this disappearing practice.

Using tools from her performance practice, artist Victoria Bradford Styrbicki will lead participants through improvisation and iteration, learning basic tasks like loading the net needle and tying the sinch knot to experimenting with mesh sizes and dip techniques. The workshop will be a laboratory, or a site that together we should approach with a spirit of experimentation, with a spirit of trial and error, even of play, and, insistently, of humor—that is, the ability to laugh at ourselves and find joy in what we come upon even as we begin to take ourselves too seriously.

Participants will go away with the net they create during the workshop as well as a spool of twine and a net needle for future experimentation and practice.

Host or Publisher Mississippi Watershed Management Organization