We're in Thailand
Today we're in Thailand with Kitty Wilson Brown, co-founder of Contemporary Hempery. A community project to grow industrial hemp for textile production.
Last summer, we visited Contemporary Hempery at their farm in Suffolk to understand the process of growing, harvesting and spinning hemp for fibre. Today, Kitty Wilson Brown is taking over our Instagram from Thailand to give us a glimpse of her artist residency at studio Naenna in Chiang Mai.
Studio Naenna is a community of women weavers, embroiderers, designers in Chaing Mai, who comprise the women’s group “Weavers For the Environment” (WFE), bringing together craft makers from various ethnic groups to create high quality, environmentally friendly, sustainable products and offering the workers an alternative from working in factories. Kitty is taking a master dye class with founder Patricia Cheeseman and learning about indigenous handcrafted textiles in South East Asia; before meeting with the Hmong hill tribe who have grown hemp for textiles for centuries.
Follow Kitty’s Journey via our Instagram stories here.
HOW WE MET KITTY
We met Kitty and her co-founder Claire O’Sullivan in 2023 over a Zoom chat and we quickly warmed to their passion - bringing hemp back to the textile industry. Kitty and Claire have about nine acres of land at Waklyn’s Farm in Suffolk, an agroforestry site on 23 hectares of land which is occupied by other complementary organisations with a mission to bring craft and community together across food, textiles and handcrafts such as basket weaving. Since the initial encounter with them, they’ve featured in our first print journal AGREENCULTURE, whereby they take us on their journey of starting a hemp farm, obtaining a license to grow the crop (which once was a thriving industry in the UK and Europe), however due to changes in law has now become a challenge to set up and maintain; and their hopes for a fashion and farming industry with the super plant - hemp.
In August 2023, we visited their farm alongside a group of 30 other visitors during their annual harvest. We spent three days at Wakelyn’s farm to understand the process of growing, harvesting, spinning and weaving hemp in the UK. Below are a few images from the long weekend and we will be sharing more about our learnings over the next few weeks.
A GLIMPSE OF OUR TRIP
August 2023
Photography: Matilda Trevitt
Harvesting the hemp - holding a stack of the stem