mill town : august ’23
contributor noel writes: “bricks are an easily overlooked visual trace of the textile mill history of Lebanon, NH, where I spent the bulk of my childhood. they’re all around here - the solid walls of the old mill-building-turned-business-park, the municipal buildings around the town green, crumbling out of the embankment above a railroad bed i walked with my dad as a kid, now transformed into a paved bikeway.
in the overgrown lot beside the high school is an old brickworks - the site of the densmore brick co., which opened in 1800 and turned out up to 95,000 bricks a week until 1974, all from the clay-rich pond bed beside the kilns. these bricks housed the grist and fulling mills, the dye works, the spinnery, the tannery, and were what remained through several major fires.
after several decades’ tumble-down forgetting, this town is undergoing new burst of development and economic growth, and most of the ragged places that held open a door for my imagination during my adolescent journeying into the underworld have been cleaned up. loose bricks are harder to come by. these particular bricks came from a site near the old Mascoma Flannel Mill, one of the largest remaining buildings from Lebanon’s industrial boom times.
being back here working as a weaver and clothing maker in a town built around textile mills, making my cloth on historic looms that predate the bricks of industrialization, i feel like i’m sneaking up alongside time, jumping back and forth in it, crumbling the story of its linearity between my fingers. maybe we’re doing the same with these bricks.”
contributor: Noel Guetti
noel works with cloth. cloth as mirror, cloth as guide, cloth as protection, cloth as anchor, cloth as means of knowing oneself. cloth as architecture, cloth as home. cloth as relationship. cloth as ecological member. cloth as metaphor, cloth as poetry, cloth as crystallized thought. cloth as tactile, sensual interaction. cloth as exploration of beauty. cloth as vessel for history. cloth as measure of time. cloth as storyteller. cloth as its own self.
noel guetti is a material philosopher/lifelong textile craftsperson. he works with the overlapping practices of weaving, natural dyeing, sewing and pattern design to ever more deeply insinuate himself into the interplay of cloth and being alive.
IG @prayersforwhatis / www.prayersforwhatis.com
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