Performative installation (modified loom components, woven silk bands dyed with beetroot pigment, weaving bench).
MFA project, Oslo National Academy of the Arts
Negotiation of Forces is a performative weaving construction, built to emphasize the tensions in the reciprocal dialogue that occurs between body, tools and materials. This strategy has emerged from an intention to approach an embodied and immersive relationship with my practice. How does a body adapt to a craft, and how does the craft change in response?
As argued by anthropologist Tim Ingold, all making, especially weaving, is a modality of growth, and the body and any work produced in a craft relationship become a symbiotic, adaptive being. The textile is a life-sustaining extension and evolution of the human body. Our mutual dependence is the ground out of which I have developed this work.
My research has settled into a generative weaving installation, designed to encourage the blurring of boundaries between body, loom and dyebath, fibers and pigments (the body becomes the tool, the material is the body, the material is the tool). The installation itself is woven as it is activated, made up of an unbroken silk band. I am integrated in the weaving through a modified backstrap loom, ancient technology that relies on muscular resistance for tension. To this end, the woven band loops around my waist, and around the weaving heddles, connecting my feet to them. With the dyepot, it anchors the system to the room and my body. If an element is out of balance, it will collapse. I can continually graft new threads onto this band, so in theory we could go on growing indefinitely. This ecosystem is perfectly calibrated to fit my body and circumstance, an enhanced, collaborative being, like a stone-age cyborg.
(link) to video documentation of the project
(link) to paper published in FormAkademisk, as presented at the BICCS Craft Sciences Conference in Mariestad in 2023.
Photos: Øystein Thorvaldsen, Kristina Hernandez
