🖼 We gathered with Jakkai Siributr's work at @canalprojectsny for an afternoon of collective reading, movement, and textile-based thinking, by slowing down and letting our hands do the thinking.
🧶 Led by SoRA Resident Curator Haena Chu @ennui.unni and artist-scholar Kathleen Quaintance, the workshop invited people to notice how touch carries memory: how something as simple as fabric can hold stories, and how paying attention can shift how we connect with each other and the world around us 🎗
Photos by Maeve Kydd and Caroline Taylor Shehan.
#art #brooklyn #queens #nyc #fashion
long time no post , but for the archive’s sake only —
1. Absolutely fabulous knitting machine wizardry by New Haven’s premier machine knitter!! @denniscarrolll 🥺😍🫣🤩
2. Teaching with my mom aka the one who taught me all my textile skills at the incomparable incredible @schoolofattention , a truly excellent refuge for the human experience 🪁
3. A fraction of this years delicious indigo harvest that I was able to glean with the @ysfp
4. I hand dyed all this yarn and hand wove it too and all you get to see of it is this goofy picture 🙂↕️
5. Teaching class on indigo dyeing from seed to blue (aka vernacular chemistry) 🪣
6. My mom teaching a cooking class on local TV in the 90s (also vernacular chemistry!!) 🥘
7. Looms on the deck at haystack — weaving in August in breezy Maine outdoors is sooo nice even if the heddles hate the sea air and rust real bad in response 🩹
8. Lurex, cotton, wool / blooming star motif that I wove after my great-great-aunt Arra Mae 🕸️
9. A little fragment of a lovely brooks bouquet weaving by Kay Sekimachi ✨
I’m finally these beautiful amazing fabulous posters from last fall because I never got around to it but I’m still in awe of them !! Thank you @ohlookitsgracehan you’re so talented :,) these were made by embossing clothing onto paper using a printing press. I love how you can see the all the wrinkles and seams and hems of clothes that we might otherwise overlook. It prompts me to look closer to everything around me. That, plus stitching in community with others, makes life better. 🪁 We’re meeting again next Tuesday Jan 27th in Loria B50 (the basement of 190 York St.) bring any projects you may have or let me help you start a new one as some supplies (plus refreshments!!) are provided. It’s been 2 years of doing this group and it’s brought a lot of joy, at least to me!!
While it's so cold and gloomy out, I thought I might as well post the indigo harvest of autumn 2024. I loved this process and felt very blessed to have helped engineer it from seed allll the way to dye. It is a very long process, involving dirt, sweat and ferment-scent, but also a lot of beauty and alchemy. :) Can't wait to do it all over again this year!
1. Activating the indigo molecules with the addition of calcium hydroxide
2. The beautiful metallic sheen on the surface lets me know it's fully fermented
3. Removing the plant matter
4. Adding calx and stirring!
5. Blue jean blue :,)
6. Scooping up every last bit of pigment
7. A. showing me how the pigment settles according to the KPZ equation (his physics knowledge and my vernacular pigment science knowledge unite!)
I’m posting some pics from the summer and fall now bc at the beginning of last year (2024) I mostly got rid of social media, coming on to this site only occasionally on my laptop and posting some things from there. (PSA you can use instagram on the desktop if you, like me, want to get off the phone more!) Instead, I read a lot more, in part to pass (which i did, yay!) my qualifying exams for my PhD, which required digesting many large books and regurgitating them. I also did a lot of teaching, a little lecturing, and of course lots of weaving.
I won’t pretend like getting off social media in favour of reading a ton of books was totally cleansing though, nor am I patting myself on the back for it - in fact, I feel sad that I’m so far behind on communicating/out of touch with a lot of old friends. it’s a fool’s errand to think that deleting all social media and just mainlining the books will enlighten you. it can often just make you lonely -- nothing is a cure for ills of the modern world, nor does any one thing cause it. so if you can’t or don’t want to kick the habit, it’s ok: the thing can’t control you! reject technological determinism!
If you’re in nyc or new haven, let’s hang! let’s get a drink and catch up irl. if you aren’t, and you want to stay in touch, dm me your address. I have a little hobby now of making silly little collaged cards and it’s been super relaxing.
Here’s what’s going on in these pics:
1. kind of cursed but mostly accurate new id photo
2. A carrot I pulled out of the ground that is a literal little man
3. Me and JC--note the tub of shea butter intended to denote foot anointing oil
4. Cutting the thorns off his crown
5. He loves me:)
6. Me and my twin
7. Beloved little family
8.Kooky self-drafted overshot weaving I did, rather unflatteringly captured here with my phone flash, but whatever
9. Me and momma on my 26th bday
I'm never on instagram anymore (am haphazardly posting this from my computer desktop) but wanted to share an event I'm really excited about that's happening !!tonight!!!! if you are in the yale area, please do come through!
-- a panel discussing textile thinking, 6-8pm in the sculpture studio building, 36 edgewood st, room 204.
thank you @h__l__d for assembling this fab group of textile-oriented people and @allison_yoon and dydanniiii for the stunning graphics <3<3
I'm just posting these now because I finally got around to scanning them, but these are the contact prints I made in june after we got the chance to fiddle around with an 8x10 camera, old school style. these are two exposures, showing stitching. I was kinda inspired by those strange multi-exposure "time and motion" studies done in the very early 20th century, which attempted to determine the movements involved in different tasks in order to choreograph a more "streamlined" labouring body, thus maximizing the efficiency of the assembly line or even the home. they're weird images: with enough exposures, a light affixed to the worker would appear to draw a bright line mapping the repeated dips and flights of their hand. (oddly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, the technique was honed by frank and lillian gilbreth, the couple mostly known for writing "cheaper by the dozen.") I love the shadow of the fingers on the last pic leftover from accidental light pollution .. it all still seems like a mystical situation, even if it was once used to supposedly "scientifically manage" hand workers -- or one's own children. still, shooting on the 8x10 and developing it using trays of various potions is a much slower medium than the 10 second videos that populate everything now: I'm still rocking with instagram on desktop, attention economy be damned...>:)
posting this from desktop, where I'll keep my instagram use indefinitely, I think!! anyways, archive of the summer:
1.obsessing over the beauty of Esther Mahlangu's work in cape town
2. living for poky flowers
3. living our lives at wysing arts centre
4. african penguins!!
5. english flower rendered in layered organza
6.trying to build by hand
7. wild study textile at the crafts study centre. figuring out how this was made is a special lil mind puzzle
June recap part II: Experiencing canonically beautiful things like sunsets and flowers .. I put some of this on my story but am posting here for memory’s sake / archival consistency 🤓
1. Me and my lovers shadow during manhattanhenge: not sunburnt, just washed in sunset color
2-3: footprints of the beloved woven forever
4. A place to sit
5. I love thistles and the beautiful color on the end of the color spectrum 💜🍇☂️🌂♌️🟪🟣🪁🍠
6. Hagstone number one
7-9: feasting my eye balls on gardens
🪐🐚🪷🪸June recap part I: i met some cool people at the summer institute for studies in technical art at Harvard art museums yayyy🪸
🪲portrait: doing work in my work smock 🪱
🪲discovering what a human wingspan means in relation to Bauhaus tapestry weaving + my own embodied experience as a weaver 🥲
🪲what I was stitching on the first slide: dye samples from farm work with YSFP
🪲learning about a worm-eaten altarpiece 🤩
🪲temporality of pastel part 1: silk moire from the 18c
🪲temporality of pastel part 2: taylor rose’s iconic SpongeBob from memory before and after
🪲Doris salecedo’s stitched quilt of rose petals 😩
🪲 touching a rose petal 🌹🥀i love to touch
🪲fibers under a microscope 🔬 🪡🧶
🪲carrying the Indigo plants to be put in the earth 🕊️👩🏼🌾
Retrospective view of April and may ❤️
1. Me and my sweetie at the ballet trying to imitate the sculpture 🗽How lucky I feel to have found someone who will go to all the Jerome Robbins choreo with me on that sweet under-30 discount, while we still can 🤓
2. Me in front of an Olga de amaral piece made up of smaller handwoven pieces :0 very cool
3. My scientist boyfriend is the best museumgoer ever bc he studies everything so intently as if he is trying to understand its behavior and it’s taught me a whole new way of seeing / strengthened my attentional practice 🥺
4. Me and Momma :)
5. Pondering, cheekily, what a monastic playground might look like
6. At the hat shop w ma
7. Happy happy happy. Extreme cheese 🧀 alert
8. Learning about fractals, order out of chaos, and weaving
9. Spider queen on a board game from 1850s England
Retrospective of the past few months just for record-keeping’s sake (cool or cringe to use instagram as personal archive?? I don’t care). This is January-February-March ❄️
1. Me on bald head island marsh, taken by my brother
2. My mother and her sewing friends working out a construction problem together. They’re all incredibly talented and have outta this world garment/fit engineering skills, and it’s super fun to hang out with them :)
3. And 4. Strange stuff found in various archives. As always I love being a historian forever
5. Talking abt a smooth print of textured stitches in moma storage in LIC
6. Giving a little talk at the moma on some of my work discussing the collisions and mythologies that stitched together the history of computers & the history of weaving (the legend ekalan took the pic ty ekalan 🥺)
7. One of my fave lil details in a Florine stettheimer painting in the Yale gallery, a space I was really lucky to teach in
8. From research on kids schoolbooks in the YCBA
9. A stunning textile from Uzbekistan that a friend from there lent me to alter, on the altar that is my loom. A lovely thing that I looked at lots when the days were still short (ty @fur_qat !)
10. My ship-of-Theseus quilt, so called because the patches are stacking up so much that the original quilt might be totally covered in a couple of years due to everyday wear and love ❤️ amazing loom computer sticker by @sophia__djs and basketry sticker by @happygocrafty 😎
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Ty if u read this or found it interesting but if no it’s ok it’s for the files to remind me of what I did when, bc it’s easy to forget 😵💫
