Material Change

November 8 - December 3, 2021

This series of weavings was born out of the constraints and challenges brought about by the last year. Without access to a floor loom, I reframed my stretcher bar loom as freedom in the form of hand craft. I allowed myself to go slow, even as I struggled with a sense of urgency. Even with recent access to the floor loom, there is value in my DIY solutions. Anything that can hold tension between parallel threads can become a loom.

Tapestry needle in hand, the ritual of stringing a weft thread over a warp, then under the next one, becomes a breath, a phrase, and a thought. A woven cloth becomes a journal entry. It gives me time to think about the ways in which I hold multiple truths at once. Just as my wefts intersect and overlap with my warps, these multiple truths create the full story: the cloth. I find myself at the cross section of multiple communities, yet as an individual, I am the few stray wefts that unravel when the cloth is cut.

When I weave, I use what I have rather than buying new yarns, but my choices feel isolated and powerless knowing that corporations will produce more waste in a day than I will in my lifetime. 

We do not need to stay powerless. We can combine the warps and wefts of our varying needs and desires together. While they may not become uniform, they will be unified as one cloth. We can fabricate material change.