Sarah Broomfield

Sarah Stopenhagen Broomfield is a fiber artist who designs, weaves, dyes with natural dyes, and leads indigo dyeing workshops. Sarah uses natural fibers and prefers natural dyes, but also uses commercially dyed yarns that were obtained to rescue the yarns from going to waste. Wool, linen, cotton, hemp, alpaca, and silk are her standard yarns. Re-using, re-dyeing, and re-purposing materials in her studio practice connects her to the natural world. Many of the yarns used in her weavings are heirloom yarns sourced from former handweaving centers in Berea, and from studios of weavers who have left them behind.

Sarah grew up in Ohio and Indiana and has lived in the small college town of Berea, the Arts & Crafts Capitol of KY most of her adult life. Berea is the site of the former Churchill Weavers industrial handweaving center, where she worked as a designer. Sarah is committed to keeping handweaving traditions alive by producing items from her upcycled yarn inventory. She has served as a mentor to two weavers in Berea College’s Appalachian Folklife Apprenticeship program.

Sarah’s interest in natural dyeing has led to workshops in indigo dyeing where she teaches the deep history of indigo’s use across world cultures and throughout history. Connecting participants with the ancient uses of indigo plants, her workshops lead them to make art that merges the maker with the sublime.

Clay can be used as a resist paste for making designs on fabric when dyeing with indigo, and Sarah uses this technique in the indigo workshops at Recovering Joy Arts and Nature Center. There, they use "spoil clay" from mountaintop removal sites to create resist patterns on indigo dyed fabrics. Turning a waste material from the extractive industry into art is another metaphor for the transformation women participants make in their lives as they move from addiction to wellness. The metaphor of indigo’s transformative shift to blue parallels the healing journey of addiction recovery. Indigo-dipped fabrics change from green to blue as they oxidize, making visible a transformation fueled by the unseen oxygen around us, changing plain fabric into something beautifully blue. Indigo dyeing workshops, along with growing Japanese indigo in the high tunnel greenhouse at Recovering Joy help to deepen the experience for the participants as they use nature’s abundant resources to make changes on cloth. The changes and marks they create on cloth reflect their struggles and commitment to turning their lives around from addiction to wellness, wholeness, peace, and joy.

Sarah’s recent weavings are conceptual works commenting on issues we face in the Anthropocene era on this small planet. Issues of just access to and preservation of clean water, preserving forest land, sustainable use of urban land, and nurturing the fibershed where we live are themes addressed in her weavings.