OneTree Alaska Tempestry Tapestry Project weaves science into art

A group of women gathered in the OneTree Alaska classroom on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus last week to begin a project to weave 50 years of climate data into art, one day, one row at a time.

The Tempestry Tapestry Project is an offshoot of the Tempestry Project, a global collaboration of fiber artists who encode climate data into knitted, crocheted or woven items as a way to spread environmental education and climate activism. That project dovetails with OneTree’s mission to engage learners of all ages in boreal forest education, citizen science and forest product development.

“We are centrally concerned with phenology, seasonality and climate change,” said Jan Dawe, OneTree’s director. Phenology is the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, especially in relation to climate and plant and animal life. OneTree Alaska is part of the UAF Institute of Agricultural, Natural Resources and Extension.

“Our Tempestry Tapestry Project provides a wonderful way to combine the birch sap data we collect every spring with Rick Thoman’s green-up index and Susan Harry’s pollen data,” Dawe said.

The idea behind OneTree is to take a tree — in this case, an Interior Alaska white birch, Betula neoalaskana — and use products made from it as a springboard for lesson plans and active learning that integrate the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) with the arts (visual, performing and literary).

The OneTree Alaska program was inspired by the OneTree organization in the United Kingdom, in which artists crafted dozens of beautiful items from the wood of a single oak from the Cheshire forest.

OneTree Alaska began with one tree harvested from Cache Creek in 2009.

Long before that, UAF researchers started tracking when a stand of birch trees on Chena Ridge turned from winter gray to spring green, an event that serves as a seasonal marker called “green-up” in interior Alaska.

That seasonality has been tracked for the past 50 years and is shown as a graph of colorful stripes in one corner of the classroom. The graph maps green-up, the flow of birch sap and pollen over a 92-day period between March 1 and May 31.

“This is the only place, as far as climatologist Rick Thoman knows, in the United States that there is this kind of record,” Dawe said. “So what we're working with is unique.”

On Tuesday, the group’s charge was to translate that data into woolen tapestries using small looms, some of which were provided by Bonni Brooks, a longtime Fairbanks spinner weaver who is leading the Tempestry workshop.

“We're working toward getting the first set or two of data ready to display in time for Fairbanks Fiber Festival in the fall,” Brooks said. The Folk School is working on a OneTree3 project this year, in which 30 collaborators are taking parts of another birch tree and creating artworks, which will be displayed in 2024. Some parts of that tree are also being woven into the Tempestry Tapestry projects.

The original idea behind the Tempestry Project was to knit a row a day using a color showing the high temperature for that day in your area.

“People from all over the world did it and there were protests, parades and events and, you know, scarves all around,” Brooks said. Translating the vast scale of the conversation about climate change into an accurate, tangible and beautiful tapestry helps make the discussions more relatable on a personal scale.

Tempestry projects use a standardized set of yarn colors and temperature ranges so a project in one area can be directly compared to others across the globe. For the OneTree project, artist-in-residence Kesler Woodward and a group of natural resource students chose the palette, the colors of which are reflected on the climate strips on the walls of the OneTree studio. Each color represents a five-degree (Fahrenheit) range, and Brooks used knots to represent each degree in between.

OneTree Alaska’s Tempestry Tapestry Project is based on the data collected from 50 years of tracking green-up in Interior Alaska, beginning in 1974. The project maps green-up, the flow of birch sap and pollen over a 92-day period between March 1 and May 31, with the exception of 1975, Dawe said. Meteorologist Ted Fathauer and Thoman created the algorithm based on degree days to predict green-up.

And while science is the backbone of Tempestry, Brooks said the OneTree weavers aren’t bound to faithfully reflect the daily stripes in their work for this particular project. She is already planning to weave the stripes according to the actual temperatures.

“There are already groups of people who are encoding different kinds of data besides high temperatures,” she said. “There's a New Normal Tempestry that deals with climate shift. So there are lots of different ways that you could interpret it. And for us, in particular, in this project,
there aren't going to be any rules.”

Brooks suggested weavers start by choosing a month — March, April, May — that had meaning for them. She picked January for her demonstration project, noting that it’s outside of the OneTree parameters, but as she wove the row for each day, she remembered what she was doing on that day, and how she felt.

That rang true for weaver Pam Sousanes, a physical scientist who focuses on climate and snowpack for Denali National Park. She said she is interested in the OneTree Tempestry project because “memories and climate are all triggers of everyday things in our lives.”

The one thing Brooks asked weavers to do was conserve the yarn.

“I’ll show you some techniques so that you can go straight from one color into the next without having little tails or ends,” she said. “The idea would be that if a climate geek scientist 50 years from now had to unwind one of these things to get accurate temperature data, that could happen because there's precisely one yard (of yarn) for every date.”

Then everyone got to work. Brooks walked around helping those who asked to set up the cotton warp threads (up and down), which serve as the framework for the specially dyed woolen weft (which goes “weft to right,” Brooks said, laughing.)

Brooks said the basic technique is a discontinuous weft-faced weave, meaning the yarn does not have to go across the warp.

People can do Tempestry-inspired projects with similar yarn hues, but those are not considered authentic Tempestry projects.

“Because the Tempestry colors are true, straight,” she said. “It’s not a branding thing, as much as a universal connection to all the different communities that are doing this.”

The Tempestry Project provides the platform that allows local communities to fine-tune what is important to them, Dawe said.

“So we hope to discover what’s important to us,” Dawe said. “It’s just the beginning.”

For more information, visit https://onetreealaska.weebly.com/ or https://www.tempestryproject.com/

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