A vast workforce of girls and young women (8,962 in Lowell, Massachusetts, alone) were employed by the early textile mills in the US, and they performed skilled labor over deafening, dangerous machines. In 1834 and 1836, these girls protested their underpaid thirteen-hour workdays with well-organized “turn outs”—the first strikes of cotton-factory workers in the country.

In 2022 I attended a residency at Lower Cavity, a former textile mill in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Half in Sunlight was developed in two parts: a site-specific installation of 30,000 feet of yellow twine tightly wrapped around the brick columns of the project space, anchoring the parallel weft threads dimensionally in a 90-foot-long woven structure; and a series of cyanotype studies that reference the mill girls.

The project’s title comes from “A Week in the Mill,” printed in 1845 in The Lowell Offering, author unknown (the girls were highly literate and produced their own publications). In describing the alternating drudgery and potential of a mill laborer’s life, she notes, “It lies half in sunlight—half in shade.” This project was supported by a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission.