Interlacing

Spring 2015

Textile processes act as metaphor for the life cycle. 
From the potential energies inherent in gestation and birth
to the slow and often painful unraveling of constituent parts in death, 
life exists as the interlacing between them.

The following videos were installed in a constructed enclosure to provide space in which to mourn, meditate and celebrate, one month after my mother’s passing.

Endless Becoming was installed as a looping projection on suspended threads, a meditation on the potential contained within materials before being woven, akin to a fetus during gestation. Computer Aided Design software for weaving was used to produce the still images in this animation in which any frame could be the blueprint for a functional woven fabric.

The Ebb and Flow of the Well-Worn Path was installed as a movement between two monitors, connected by a woven fabric (see Black Forest), illustrating the space between birth and death. Threads are moments accrued and lost, the visible fabric between them the mark of a life lived.

Unbound and Undone depicts the landscape of a funerary shroud being unraveled thread by thread, until only chaos remains. The shroud depicted is a duplicate of the one I wove for my mother’s casket; the act of unraveling a cathartic method for processing the loss. In installation, the remnant threads were placed on a plinth beside the monitor and accompanied by a bowl of sand and incense.