In weaving, what seems to be a surface is a multi-dimensional world—a choreography of threads moving up, across, along. And the past, always, embedded there. Holes, frayed edges, unraveling.

My thinking about the relationship of line and substrate, mark-making and time, was informed by Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems and Kuba velvet cloths.

The envelopes Dickinson flattened to serve as paper for her writing, sometimes referred to as “scraps,” are tactile objects—the creases, puckers, and folds as much a part of the text as her handwriting, dashes, and variant words. By dividing the page into columns, Dickinson broke her poetic lines even shorter. As Jen Bervin writes, “The page feels bigger yet, as if there has been an insertion of space.”

Kuba textile artists of the Congolese River Basin, working contemporaneously with Dickinson, developed an original form of geometric art in cut-pile raffia cloths known as winu (plural buiin). Dense yet airy, their internal divisions expand—explode—space. Their meaning also lies in use: in funerary rites, long wrappers enveloped the bodies of title-holders, with a winu as the final covering—containers not only for the body, but for the village’s social order.

In reading about Kuba customs of dressing for the afterlife, I realized I didn’t know what clothing my mother was buried in. This weaving uses the poetic principle of enjambment—the line uniting, even as it divides—to hold her absence. It is an envelope composed in a number of directional fields, a gesture to how the past wraps around the present.