Either/And: Where loom and Canvas Meet
As published in "Painted Threads," Exhibition Catalog, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2019
Mark Barrow and Sarah Parke, Reweave 9.2, 2016 (detail)
The punch cards that give instructions to the warp threads on a Jacquard loom are almost works of art in their own right. Each is a rectangle, linked to the next by plain white threads to form a long chain. The cards are punched with rows of round holes in rhythmic patterns; each hole is the same size, but the patterns they form vary from card to card. Watching them click past one another as a woven pattern takes shape on a loom is hypnotic. Invented by French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1803, the Jacquard loom helped mechanize the European textile industry, but it is also a touchstone in the history of modern computing. Though he could not have known it, Jacquard’s device was the handcrafted wooden ancestor of computers as we know them today, from the room-sized IBM devices of the mid-20th century to the globally connected supercomputers we call our phones. They’ve now been replaced by more sophisticated and powerful information-storage devices, but paper punch cards, which were the Jacquard loom’s native language, were widely used in computing through the 1960s, and are still used in some old-fashioned voting machines today. The cards illustrate something profound about both textile language and computing language: the curious fact that a pattern, whether the holes in a Jacquard punch card or the data known as computer software, can be read at face value by a human being and simultaneously direct a machine to create a different pattern, yielding something entirely new.
The holes in a Jacquard punch card are instructions to the warp threads on a loom, each of which is held in place by a pin that lifts it up and down. The cards are designed as if to answer yes/no questions. If a punch-card hole allows the pin to pass through it, a thread is lifted—akin to a “yes”; if there is no hole, the thread remains in place—akin to a “no.” With each pass of the shuttle, “yes” threads are made visible in the weave and “no” threads are not. The result, after thousands of passes, is a complex, woven pattern that owes its structure to its punch-card code but does not resemble it visually. In computing, we call this yes/no system binary code, meaning that the answer must be one of two things; it cannot be both, and it cannot be neither. In recent years, the term binary—and more vitally, its opposite, nonbinary—have become cultural terms for describing our increasingly nuanced understanding of gender.
Textile language, like computer language, is a rich reservoir, full of metaphors and symbols that help us name and describe the contours of our world. The diverse and ingenious works of art in Painted Threads are examples of what happens when artists think about the binary process of weaving in new, nonbinary ways. In the unyielding, abstract world of computing, the rule is “either/or.” In the soft, material world of textiles—which comprise real-world atoms and molecules, not virtual-world pixels—the rule is “either/and.” Techniques and media can be combined and are not mutually exclusive; proportions can be shifted and patterns can be remixed. Fibers are apt to yield and remain strong, rather than break or fail.
In the past several decades, works of art made from fiber and cloth have straddled disciplinary boundaries. For centuries, fibers destined for walls typically took the form of a tapestry or a quilt. Other types of cloth were apt to be worn, or used to clean, dry, and comfort us in our daily lives. When artists like Sheila Hicks, Claire Zeisler, and Ruth Asawa began introducing both fiber and textile techniques into the realm of sculpture in the 1950s and ’60s, they scrambled the traditional hierarchies of fine art and craft, giving textiles new, knotty layers of ambiguity. Each of them experimented with weaving off the loom, and created large, even monumentally scaled work; in Asawa’s case, she worked with metal wire as though it were thread. Was their work feminine or masculine? Domestic or professional? Avant-garde or vernacular? One of the things that gives fiber its narrative power as a material for artists is that it is very much at home in the worlds of both fine art and textile art, and cannot easily be classified in a binary fashion.
The artists in Painted Threads approach the loom as a starting point, taking the formal, even rigid technique of weaving to eccentric heights by tweaking the process, adding to it, and breaking the rules. Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson has drawn inspiration from a rock formation in the northern region of her native Iceland. Her piece Hvitserkur (2018, p. 32) is named for the iconic basalt stack, which looks a bit like a broad-shouldered figure and whose Icelandic name means “white shirt.” Jónsson often photographs landscapes in Iceland and uses the images she captures to design woven works. Working on a loom, she paints the threads before they are woven together. “When the warp and weft meet, there is an intersection of two colors,” she says, noting that the human eye blends the colors together on sight. She describes her pieces as “pointillist”—a term that comes from the work of Postimpressionist painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. [1]
Painting on threads before they are woven is extremely labor-intensive; it typically involves chaining warp threads together, dyeing them by hand on a large work surface, then arranging them back on the loom once they are dry and the color is set. By hand painting warp threads, artists can ensure that, although they are using a tool that creates a regular, even-finished product by design, there is no woven cloth anywhere that is identical to what they have made.
Like Jónsson, Oriane Stender also paints threads before she weaves, working with a relatively simple, warp-faced twill pattern. The complexity in her pieces, which are animated by forms that echo architectural elements from Europe and the Islamic world, is derived from her hand painting, not the weave. “It feels more accurate,” she says, “to call [my works] woven paintings than painted weavings.” [2] She forms her patterns with six layers of pigment. The final result is somewhat off-register, so it looks as though the shape is echoed in the background.
Mark Barrow and Sarah Parke, who work together as Barrow and Parke, create layered, woven forms that draw on their separate artistic interests and training—Parke is a weaver and Barrow is a painter. “Weaving’s logic became the conceptual backbone of our entire practice,” Barrow says. [3] They create each work from start to finish as a team, considering the way in which weaving is an additive process that marks time. In one sense, time moves forward as the woven form gets longer and longer. In another way, it is circular, as the pattern repeats itself in a cycle.
While some artists lean towards the watercolor-like fluidity of painting on thread, others gravitate to the “feel” of computing and the look of its output. Interlace 3 (2019, detail on p. 15), Samantha Bittman’s site-specific, vinyl-wallpaper installation for the Art Center’s stairwell, is created in Photoshop and printed digitally. To produce this installation, Bittman first selected a color palette and then designed a digital-weave draft where each pixel equals one square inch. She enlarged this original file, scaling it to fit the specific space. In her painted woven pieces, she paints with acrylic on the surface of the textile, creating a new layer of pattern that responds to the underlying weaving. Yet the woven form is always the same: One pattern is intrinsic to the structure of the weave, and the other, like Jónsson’s and Stender’s painted warp threads, is an echo of what is already there.
Working in collaboration with programmer and inventor Julian Goldman, artist Victoria Manganiello has created a work that clearly recalls weaving’s digital roots. Her piece Computer 1.0 of 2018 (p. 34 and 35) is an interactive work made from woven cloth and polymer tubing. The “brains” of the piece, as described by Goldman, is a computer and a “pump box” that pumps water and air through the woven tubing on a continuous loop. This effectively turns the textile into a “display,” says Goldman, as though it were a screen made from glowing pixels, making the link between the computing and textile worlds crystal clear. [4] “We think of ‘Women in Tech’ as a new phenomena [sic] when actually women (including many indigenous ones) have been working with computing in and around textiles for centuries,” says Manganiello. [5] Fiber and clothing surround us just like computers and smartphones do, but in different ways. Computer 1.0 highlights the relationships between them, and manifests the idea that we bask in the very real glow of electronic technology and information day and night, often as unthinkingly as we put on clothes or shoes.
Two artists in Painted Threads embrace ambiguity, especially when it comes to the dimensions in which works made from fiber exist. A native of Turkey, Desire Rebecca Moheb-Zandi grew up watching her grandmother weave on a loom in her childhood home, and has maintained a love for weaving ever since, while exploring how the loom can be used as a sculptural tool. Her work Maze of 2019 (p. 37) is made using an appropriately dizzying array of techniques. The dark-blue segment is hand-dyed wool, with turquoise rope that has been hand-wrapped in thread. The sculptural part, which resembles a classical Chinese landscape scroll painting crossed with the tree and cloud-filled, 16-bit landscape of Nintendo’s video game “Super Mario Bros. 2,” is constructed from Poly-fil, nylon, and silk thread. “Painting on fiber leads to more complex creations, more layers,” she says. “It tells stories. You are weaving your canvas as you want with materials, [it] give[s] [the work] structure, pattern, [and] tactile properties, and then painting allows you to transform the work into something else.” [6]
Crystal Gregory embraces the notion of “something else” both formally and metaphorically. To make her piece Shifting Center 1 (2019, p. 31), she cast woven fiber into concrete, then embedded the cloth into two panels so that it dips between them when mounted on the wall. The gesture is elegant, like the arc of a hoopskirt in motion. Gregory is inspired by the writing of Pennina Barnett, who posed prescient questions in her catalog essay for the 1999 exhibition Textures of Memory: The Poetics of Cloth: “What if the poetics of cloth were composed of ‘soft logic,’ modes of thought that twist and turn and stretch and fold? And in this movement new encounters were made, beyond the constraint of binaries?” [7] Gregory’s works, which flirt with sculptural dimensions but cling to the wall, seem to hover in this particular region of ambiguity. Yet in a sense, they could not be more familiar. According to Gregory, “We understand how these materials act because we constantly touch them. They are embedded in our environments, our language and our understanding of the world.” [8] Concrete and woven cloth, such physically different materials, appear together in Shifting Center 1 as though they cannot exist without one another. The textile logic of “either/and” unites cloth and concrete in the interest of expressing a complex idea as only fiber can.
Painting magnifies the metaphorical potential of weaving. Each of the artists in Painted Threads uses woven fiber as an idiosyncratic canvas for works that straddle two and three dimensions. Because studio craft practices were long denigrated in fine-arts contexts (and indeed, in some instances they still are), scholars, critics, and curators are apt to classify works as either “art” or “craft,” while the artists may choose not to decide one way or another. Artists might also reject the idea that the two categories are mutually exclusive. The exercise of assembling a group of works in which painting and weaving overlap is aesthetically rich, but it also sheds light on the ways in which fine art and craft practices are increasingly bound together.
Samantha Bittman, Interlace 3, 2019 (detail)
Notes
Author’s e-mail communication with Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson, July 2019.
Author’s e-mail communication with Oriane Stender, July 2019.
Author’s e-mail communication with Mark Barrow, July 2019.
Author’s e-mail communication with Julian Goldman, July 2019.
Author’s e-mail communication with Victoria Manganiello, July 2019.
Author’s e-mail communication with Desire Rebecca Moheb-Zandi, July 2019.
Pennina Barnett, “Folds, Fragments, Surfaces: Towards a Poetics of Cloth,” in Textures of Memory: The Poetics of Cloth, by Polly Binns et al., exh. cat. (Nottingham: Angel Row Gallery, 1999), 182.
Author’s e-mail communication with Crystal Gregory, July 2019.