How to Be Twice
2017
cotton and tencel
64 x 38 inches
We Am
Confusing the singular and plural suggests an alternative way of being in which self and other share definitions. The individual expands and opposites contract.
We am uncertain of our boundaries.
This series of doubleweave tapestries is the first of my explorations into combining printmaking and weaving. Yarn is screen printed with fiber reactive dyes prior to being woven. Using two warps, I can double the printed image, though only the top half is visible to me as weave.
Reading Edges
2017
screen printed dye on cotton and tencel
64 x 38 inches
Like a mirror, the experience of reading beckons us beyond the borders of our physical bodies. Printed language is not dependent on voice or breath. Only the eyes. Like water’s surface, the experience of reading reflects an alternate self—one of precarious solidity. In this piece, text ap- pears in rippling abstraction: highlighter yellow and stripes of black redaction. A watery silhouette emerges. When I read, I drink the words. They move from the page and join with my body, settling in my skin or the spaces between my vertebrae. When I read, I am looking at strings of language. I am looking inward, for a place to store the story. My self dissolves, reforms. I drink the words, no longer quite mortal.
Both the experience of desire and the experience of reading have something to teach us about edges.
—Anne Carson, (Eros the Bittersweet)
Distance Index
2017
weft ikat, cotton bamboo, acrylic
56 x 42 inches
Weaving and writing share structural similarities that govern our approach to a flat surface. Top to bottom, left to right—this is the path we follow on a page. It is not a universal choreography, however. Some cultures read right to left. The letters of the ancient Greek alphabet were reversible, so the eye travelled both directions, turning back at the end of each line or “as the ox plows.” At the dawn of literacy in Greece, oral traditions were alphabetically preserved in a continuous string of text that wound back and forth, like the decorative threads of Penelope’s loom. This piece is a love poem to the alphabet, to the visual structure of language. Poetry reimagines the rules. An index is a kind of poem.
Other Hand
2017
screen printed dye on cotton and tencel
54 x 36 inches
I am blind in one eye, and far from ambidextrous. In our culture, we praise symmetry as a kind of ideal, but no body is perfect. Woven simultaneously on two warps, this double self-portrait comes from an image that is divided at the loom—a kind of cellular mitosis. I am twice: looking at my right (good) hand with my left (good) eye; and again: looking at my left (weak) hand with my right (blind) eye. In our culture, we consider strength and dominance to be good, but I can only be unsure.
I want to become a line
diptych, 2017
screen printed dye on cotton and tencel
diptych, each panel 30 x 38 inches
This piece uses weaving as a way to dissolve. I screen printed my image onto a single length of yarn, carefully measured out, and then wove that yarn onto a warp of a slightly different measure. Like a decoder ring set to the wrong letter, the meaning was garbled. This picture of me, a transla- tion, reveals a different cadence, a rhythm almost like pattern. I am rearranged. A hide tattooed in code, my inside-out skin is no longer a sovereign border. The only wounds are exit wounds.