North House Folk School

Tara Austin

In 2014 Tara took her first rosemaling class at North House. Since then she completed a yearlong Rosemaling Apprenticeship with a Vesterheim Gold Medalist focusing on Telemark and Gudbrandsdal styles. In 2020 she received a Scandinavian Folk Arts and Cultural Traditions Grant from the American Scandinavian Foundation. Tara received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and loves plants, painting, and her home on the North Shore of Lake Superior.

Caroline Feyling

Caroline Feyling is a textile artist based in Oregon. She graduated with her BFA in Fiber and Material Studies from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. Following her graduation she completed eight weeks of intensive study at Vävstuga Weaving School in Shelburne Falls, MA. There, Caroline began her practice of creating functional Scandinavian style weavings that serve to bridge the gap between the contemporary and tradition, as well as the distance between heritage and daily life.

Liz O'Brien

Liz’s interest and enthusiasm for fiber arts runs the gamut. Primarily self-taught, she has over ten years’ combined experience in knitting, hand-stitching, decorative embroidery and natural dye work. She was first introduced to natural dyes while working as a naturalist and farm educator some years back. The magic of coaxing living color from plants was irresistible and natural dye work quickly became a cornerstone of her creativity. With an emphasis on using garden-grown or locally foraged dye materials, Liz’s work reflects an intentional practice in slowing down and cultivating an ever-growing connection between self and sense of place.

Mary Tripoli

Mary (she/her) grew up in a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania, but has been enjoying life in the Pacific Northwest for the last 20 years. After finishing a corporate career, she discovered green wood carving in 2014 and has not gone more than a few days without carving or turning something—a spoon, a spatula or bowl! She is part of a thriving carving community based at Pratt Fine Arts in Seattle, WA.

A 2021 North House Intern alum, Mary is thrilled to continue her craft practice in Grand Marais. She's looking forward to getting to know her ADP cohort and experiencing her first proper north woods winter. Mary plans to continue greenwood carving, learn new pole lathe turning techniques and forms, and take a deeper dive into chairmaking.

Cohort VI of ADP are both currently on independent study through June 30, 2024.

Wesley Hathaway

Wesley grew up in Indiana where being creative was always encouraged, whether it was playing an instrument, drawing, or just cutting up popsicle sticks. Wesley spent 6 years in the Air Force which is how he stumbled upon a folk school in Fairbanks, Alaska and got exposed to craft.

Delaney Keshena

Delaney Keshena (Menomini) is a moccasin maker and fine artist born to a train-bound border town in sleepy, north-central Wisconsin. Keshena has studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts and uses hair, skin, and glass in their practice of crafting objects in relation with the body. Their work has been shown in Italy, Belgium, and throughout the United States.

Laura Brown

Laura Brown is an artist interested in color, process, imagination, and repetitive, labor-intensive tasks. She grew up in the rural high desert of southwestern Colorado and the northwoods of Wisconsin, and hails from a maternal lineage of professional and home sewists. Her work includes printmaking, installation, book arts, and textiles. As part of the Artisan Development Program, she continues to expand her quilting knowledge and practice, including the use of natural dyes from local foraged plants.
 

Laura Brown is an artist interested in color, process, imagination, and repetitive, labor-intensive tasks. She grew up in the rural high desert of southwestern Colorado and the northwoods of Wisconsin, and hails from a maternal lineage of professional and home sewists. As a child, she learned to sew, cook, and decorate cakes in her local 4-H club, and wrote stories and kept copious scrapbooks in her spare time. These interests led her to pursue a formal studio art education, where the discovery of printmaking and book arts as disciplines made perfect sense for her love of both language and image. She continued to sew, and found delight in creating quilts, which she thinks of as collages made from fabric. These days, her work includes printmaking, installation, book arts, and textiles. At North House, she continues to expand her quilting knowledge and practice, including the use of natural dyes from local foraged plants.

Laura holds an MFA in Studio Art from University of Texas at Austin. She has participated in residencies at the Myren Graffikk in Kristiansand, Norway; the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California; Minnesota Center for Book Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York. Her work appears in collections at Yale University and the Library of Congress, among others.

View Laura's Website

Nathan White

Nathan White was born in Milwaukee, WI, and moved to Minneapolis in 2009. Through his interest in sculpture, he started carving spoons; which in turn, inspired him to pursue woodworking. His first stop of that pursuit was apprenticing at the Carpenter’s Boat Shop in Pemaquid, ME. While there, Nate lived in community with his instructors and other apprentices as they learned boat building fundamentals building and restoring skiffs, peapods, dinghies, and other smaller boats and vessels. After his apprenticeship, he stayed in Maine and worked with one of his former instructors building a house and living off grid. During his time in Maine, he was introduced to many aspects of craft such as green woodworking, and is where he first learned to turn bowls on a lathe. Following that, he went back and forth between Minnesota to work at a wooden boat restoration shop, and Maine to work as a timber framer. In 2016 he was a recipient of the Folk and Traditional Art Grant from the Minnesota States Arts Board to study traditional wooden bowls of Scandinavia. Nate received an Artist Initiative Grant also from the MSAB in 2019, and in the spring of 2021, did his first residency at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, CO.

With his time in the Artisan Development Program, Nate is looking forward to his first opportunities to teach, learn to cross country ski, and to build on the skills he already has while learning new ones along the way.

Visit Nate's Website

Emily Derke

Northern Minnesota is where Emily calls home. The materials growing in the area are of great influence in Emily’s work. Primarily a basketmaker, She works with willow, birch bark, cedar bark, and other local materials to create useful items. Emily has spent time learning basketry in folk school settings, apprenticeships, workshops, and dedicated time practicing independently over the last 10 years. Teaching has been a main focus of her work. The desire to connect with people while creating and working with the materials that grow around us has inspired Emily to continue learning more about the materials and place we live.

Basketry continues to be the main focus of Emily’s work, but she also spends a great deal of time working to harvest and grow food, exploring the land around her, sewing, tanning hides and furs, and continuing to work towards living in a way that connects her to the things we need, use and eat.

As a current Artisan Development Program participant, Emily is looking forward to diving deep into the world of basketry traditions, exploring other crafts related to life in Northern Minnesota, and working on teaching these important crafts.

Visit Emily's website

Christine Novotny

Christine Novotny is a handweaver with a love for color, pattern, and design. Christine has spent most of her life painting and drawing, capturing memory and her love for the natural world through imaginative, colorful paintings. After many years of creating work that either went up on a wall or into her flat file portfolio, she became frustrated with the lack of physical interaction between the work and the viewer. She longed to create work that was accessible, functional, tactile, and beautiful. Christine took a floor loom weaving class in 2014, thinking she would transfer the imagery in her paintings into tapestry weaving. Instead, she instantly fell in love with the precise, methodical, and attention-demanding process of creating textiles on a floor loom.

Christine has gone onto weave rugs (paintings you can step inside!), scarves, table linens, and wall art, all guided by her love for surprising color and design interactions. She enjoys manipulating the proportions and repetitions of old weaving drafts from around the world to create work that feels rich and contemporary, but still rooted in tradition. Christine firmly believes in the power of attention and slowing down, two fundamental skills in creating woven work.

Christine is thrilled to be an Artisan in Residence at North House—to have time and support to create new textiles, challenge herself to learn new skills, and gain the professional tools necessary to support a life in art and craft.

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Josh Tolkan

Josh spent his youth paddling rivers of Northern Wisconsin and sailing on Lake Michigan. While attending Carleton College he began paddling Minnesota’s Boundary Waters and sailing the midwest collegiate racing circuit. After spending a summer teaching sailing at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, he became a hobby boat builder. During seven years spent as an affordable housing project and construction manager he built a cedar strip canoe, a nutshell pram and remodeled an RV trailer into a mobile kitchen. Finally Josh decided he had had his fill of management life and needed to be using his hands on a daily basis. In 2016 he enrolled at the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building near Port Townsend, Washington. His year of school culminated in a third place finish for his team at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival’s 3 day Boat Building Challenge! In the fall of 2017 he went to work for Wilderness Inquiry in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There he redesigned and prototyped Wilderness Inquiry’s 24′ Voyaguer canoe and then helped Wenonah Canoe prepare to mass produce that design for Wilderness Inquiry.

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Elise Kyllo

Elise Kyllo grew up in South Minneapolis but immediately after college discovered a love for the wilderness while guiding BWCA trips from the end of the Gunflint Trail. This experience ultimately led her back to Grand Marais and to North House Folk School after many years of farming, urban gardening, being an environmental educator and artist.  Somewhere along the way, wool as an artistic medium entered her life and replaced the paints, clay and inks with a desire to create things of beauty and usefulness with wool. “It’s somewhat of a mystery as to how I fell in love with wool, but undoubtedly it’s the close connection to the land, the sustainability of fiber from sheep, from grass and sun, magically transforming wool into an endless list of things with just water, soap and patient agitation.  Felting with wool is completely intoxicating and never, ever dull.”  

Teaching felting at North House Folk School has allowed Elise to merge her passion for teaching, art, creativity and living simply. North House created a path back to the north shore, which has led to the building of a house, growing a north woods garden and now the Artisan Development Program. For the first time, Elise had a studio space and was able to focus on developing her felting and teaching skills, work with felting mentors, dig deeper into understanding numerous breeds of sheep and practice the nuances of being a working craftsperson/artist.

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Mike Loeffler

Mike Loeffler is a wood worker inspired by natural forms and embellished wooden folk art. Although he was always fascinated with wood, he had the opportunity to explore craft through an internship at North House in 2011. His last name, Loeffler, is a German occupational name given to spoon makers in the middle ages. This made spoons a meaningful entry point to the world of craft. After a stint of farm jobs he worked as carpenter in the Twin Cities continuing to pursue his woodworking passions on the side. Recently, Mike has been exploring fågelskålar (bird shaped ale bowls), small furniture design, as well as some traditional building techniques. With the support of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant in 2017, he was able to study and build a number of grindbygg timber frames with North House instructor Peter Henrikson. Visit Mike's website.

Marybeth Garmoe

Marybeth was born in the Midwest and spent her childhood summers exploring the forests and lakes of Northern Wisconsin, poking under logs, crafting things for play from found grapevines and bark pieces, and sneaking occasional snacks on wild onions or young dandelion leaves when her parents weren't looking.  After studying Ecology and Forestry, she held multiple jobs working in remote backcountry settings and with people who had strong ties to the land and rich cultural histories and traditions inspired by those landscapes.  Those experiences, combined with multiple folk school internships, influenced Marybeth to delve more deeply into the world of traditional craft.  After gaining years of experience turning wood, carving spoons and tying broomcorn brooms, she went rogue, quit her job, and started making her living and lifestyle by selling her hand-crafts, teaching and harvesting wild foods.  She is continually inspired by the idea of living in harmony with the seasons - growing, crafting and harvesting most of what she needs and limiting consumerism to what is necessary and affordable.  Visit Marybeth's website.

Angela Robins

Angela Robins is a woodworker and educator, inspired by the curved forms found in Scandinavian and Japanese wooden crafts, in particular the boat and bowl. Raised in the U.S. and Japan, her interest in traditional crafts was sparked from seeing images of wooden Japanese fishing boats.  After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami of northeastern Japan, she returned to her hometown and visited with traditional craftspeople in the region.  Her first opportunity to study traditional woodworking and crafts was at North House Folk School, where she was an intern in 2013. Since then she taught skin on frame wooden boatbuilding at a youth development program, Urban Boatbuilders, for three years, and continues to teach the ancient textile technique, nålbinding, to students of all ages. In 2015 she received a Minnesota Folk & Traditional Arts Grant to study Scandinavian green wooden bowl turning with Jim Sannerud. In the spring of 2015, she assisted boatbuilder and researcher Douglas Brooks with the documentation and building of a traditional wooden fishing boat with one of the last boatbuilders in northeastern Japan. As a participant in the Artisan Development Program, she will focus primarily on her wooden bowl turning and carving practice. Visit Angela’s website.