On weaving and writing

My work draws on the historical connection between weaving and writing, variously articulated:

• In metaphor, through the abundance of textile terms used to describe what language does: we follow the “thread of a thought,” the storyteller “spins a yarn,” narratives are braided, and poetry woven.

• In etymology : textcomes from the Latin texere, to weave; in the Dogon language, cloth is soy, or so y, meaning, “it is the word.”

• In material culture, through the function and use of textiles as form of non-verbal language.

Examples abound across the globe: textiles contain memories, tell personal and collective stories, and give form to abstract ideas—much like writing. Take the pre-Hispanic Andean khipus, a system of strings that served as a memory aid and calculating tool, which encoded a vast store of information in the strings’ knots, position, and direction of the twist. Or the Ndop cloth from the Grassfields of Cameroon, the patterns of which record and transmit cultural knowledge about the visible and invisible world.

Artists Anni Albers, Cecelia Vicuña, Sheila Hicks, and Jen Bervin have explored and expanded the entangled relationship between weaving and writing. Their work, in tandem with bridging the gap between art and craft, invites us to join them in finding new forms of expression by working with material, be it language or fiber.

In my own work, I am using the loom as a basis for narrative patterning to at once expose and subvert binary computer structures, which have their origins in 19th century weaving punchcards. 

With today’s increased reliance on predictive AI language models, it seems particularly urgent to reinvigorate language, to question what structures shape the stories we give our lives.