Description

Weaving brings refuge to the chaos. It anchors itself to binaries while paradoxically creating space for exceptionalism. It is defined and unlimited. It is an articulate polyglot, universally identifiable by its form and understood through material, process, and touch. At its core, weaving is foundational to human prosperity. Loom technology and weaving patterns are credited as the genesis for organizational systems including binary languages, computer coding, and the architectural framework for the internet. It offers fertile ground for metaphor and the necessary rigidity to suggest safety and structure. As such, my work utilizes weaving to build counterintuitive narratives that investigate our evolving relationships to the preciously handmade, unfolding technology, and larger questions about the distribution of cultural capital. Like the internet, weaving inherently collapses time and space without limiting its orientation. If you trace weaving back through any culture, its origin is always indeterminable. It is in the unforgiving landscape of weaving, that I find boundless freedom.

My relationship to weaving is ever expanding. It is motivated by shifting cultural priorities, reclaiming stolen narratives, and uplifting traditional craft practices. Weaving is an act of protest, defiance, and self-sufficiency. With this knowledge, my work literally pulls apart dominant narratives and art world hierarchies, offering new outcomes in both image and object. As efficiency and automation have become cultural and economic priorities, working in a notoriously slow form has become an increasingly radical gesture.

Flowing between physical and virtual spaces, the work relies on appropriated images scraped from the internet to locate and fertilize colonist ideas of non-Western people and places. Through selective material choices, the weavings can be embedded with printed images and dyes or pushed to perform in other ways like felting and shrinking. Forcing impossible perspectives, the weavings parallel popular forms of decorative textiles like tapestries and banners while engaging with critical conversations intentionally removed from the realm of functional craft by the gatekeepers of the art world. By inserting myself into these dialogues through an innocuous form like weaving, the work functions as a trojan horse poised to derail prevailing expectations.