Activities

Groups of artists meet at the Soil Factory to share their work with other artists and explore exhibiting formats, common themes, and art-making processes. Local artists with ideas, please contact [email protected].

The Craft Studio is an open workshop space that hosts Craft Jams. The Jams happen bi-weekly and are free-flowing evenings in which the sewing machines are open for use, and mending materials are available in an unstructured work environment. Regular additions to Craft Jams include the Linocut Station and Clothing Swaps.

Summary

The method of creating a fast-growing biodiverse forest of densely-planted native trees and shrubs was pioneered by a Japanese botany professor, Akira Miyawaki in the 1970s. He developed it to heal degraded land around factories, to connect the workers and their bosses to the beauty of nature. Planting day was a festival when everyone in the corporation dug holes and put the trees they’d grown from seeds into the ground.

The Soil Factory Press is an independent publisher to share work at the interface of art and sustainability science, created at The Soil Factory and beyond. Below are a few publication projects. Some of these can be obtained through The Soil Factory, whereby some of the proceeds will go to the artists, some to The Soil Factory that hosted and facilitated the projects, and some constitute handling fees to ship the publication to you.

Since 2025, the Soil Factory has participated in the Watershed Internship Program (WIP), which is organized by Discover Cayuga Lake. In 2025, intern Ray Blegen supported the bale bed gardens and took the lead in building an EcoLu using a simple grid-beam technique. In 2026, interns Makenna Dovel and Fisher St Clair helped with a major garden upgrades that included beautiful artwork. In 2026, interns Caleb LeBlanc and Kyleigh Tangen are continuing to provide beautiful gardens for the Soil Factory community.

Events take the form of performances, concerts, readings that engage audiences with diverse topics, trigger community conversations, and forge new connections.

We are currently, working on updating our website, hosted open-source and communally maintained, to better reflect our values on our online presence. More information about ongoing activities is coming soon! If you’re interested in seeing more of our previous work, check out our archive page which shows some ongoing activities not yet updated, and a catalog of our one-off events.