Time Tapestries

Here is what became of the small tapestry frames I was making- four infographic time tapestries, each representing four different spans of days. Each color represents a different activity, with certain colors being threaded throughout the series. The yellow-gold, for instance, represents eating. And the darker purple/navy represent sleep. The warp was calculated for it's full capacity of yarn and then divided into hours based on how many days I would try to fit into each frame. One hour was about 1.5" of yarn. So each activity was recorded, measured, and woven into each frame.


October 13-18: The first was done over a wedding weekend in Bucks County, PA. The turquoise here represents socializing, the cream hygiene like brushing teeth, showering, etc, and the orange dancing, or exercise. So the third day from the top is the wedding day, made obvious by the gigantic amount of time getting ready and then hours of eating followed by dancing.




October 27-November 1: The second tapestry was made during another wedding weekend in Newport, Rhode Island, only two weeks after the first. I enjoyed changing the palette each time, seeing the different relationships between colors and the random patterns made with each quantity of time.




November 9-16: The third tapestry was made during a hum-drum week in New York, with the gray representing the workday, a splash of ocre for meals, and the last two days filled with turquoise socializing and brick television/movie watching. Must have been a cold weekend!




November 23-28: The last tapestry so far in this series was done over Thanksgiving weekend while visiting my grandparents in Yorktown, Virginia. Full days of turquoise socializing peppered with navy naps (in the second and fifth days) and a whole lot of food (yellow). My favorite holiday!



I believe I'll continue this series- the frames were really satisfying to make, and weaving on the subway is a lot of fun. And I still have a lot of yarn left over!

Building Tapestry Frames

In all the time that I went without a floor loom (a sort of two-year creative desert for other reasons) I very often thought and dreamed about weaving. But somehow I was holding myself back, restricting my thoughts on what I could and could not do in regard to weaving and so I focused on other projects. Since the Baby Wolf floor loom arrived, it has seldom sat vacant. It also seems that I have been weaving just as much off-loom, from my P2P piece, Weaving the Grasses of America series, and now a still unnamed series in progress. I am weaving more than ever!

Another revelation has been tapestry. It snuck up on me- I have dabbled with it from time to time, but it hadn't stolen my heart until recently. Portable weaving! To start this next series, I built four frames from 1/2x2"s using a mitre box, drill, clamps, brads, wood glue and my weaving stool as a workbench. It is time for me to start using the woodshop down the hall! The first two frames above were for working out the kinks- a bit of uneven drilling went away with practice. I'd love to use a drill press for the following frames. After assembling the pieces, I stained them with the same stain I used for the Weaving the Grasses of America tapestry loom I built and then warped the frames with cotton carpet warp.

I'd like to keep the project under wraps for now, but the last picture shows the yarn I will be using, sent to me by my lovely aunt Beth- she has been so generous with yarn!

the weaving stool acts as my work bench for now

the frames in progress

deliciously colored tapestry wool

The Work Office

The weekend before last (September 24-26) I took part in a group show with The Work Office, a pair of artists (Naomi Miller and Katarina Jerinic) who hired 33 artists for a week to make work. It was an echoing of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) which was the largest New Deal agency in the 1930's, hiring people to do civic work like build bridges, repair roads and parks, make artwork, and more in an effort to get the American people working again.

A family story goes that my maternal grandfather from Rhode Island signed up for this program when he heard he could go build and repair roads almost 2,000 miles across the United States to Wyoming. He was excited to travel and see the country. But this project was in Wyoming, Rhode Island, which is a tiny village 30 miles from his hometown on Aquidneck Island. So he took a ferry to the mainland, but didn't even get out of the state (which, I might add for non-Americans, is the smallest state in the country, at 1,214 square miles- Wyoming, on the other hand, is the 10th largest state in the Union at 97,818 sqm.)

The Work Office show took place, fittingly, in an empty office building. Above is the entrance to the show after the Payday Party. A key component of the show was that we were hired for a week- our proposed projects had to be started and completed within a week's time-and we would be paid $23.50 for our work. This is what the pay rate was for a week's work as an artist hired by the WPA. The projects were varied, from a video of an artist paying people 50 cents for a joke, to documented conversations on the subways, embroidered flags, videos of repairs, and drawings of WPA supported art turned into postcards.

This is my piece above, Weaving the Grasses of America: part 1 Gowanus. I have been dreaming of weaving grasses from specific locations as a physical representation or map of a space for a long while now, and this is the first piece in the series! Gowanus is an industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn, home to both my studio and the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site. In this atmosphere of warehouses and the toxic canal, it is surprising to see just how much vegetation can grow- there seemed to be grasses and weeds coming up from every crack in the sidewalk this summer. Each section of the grass weft is marked by a flipbook of my feet walking the sidewalk that the grasses came from. In this way, the walking feet mark out the path and the grasses were woven in order of collection. Each moment in the weaving represents an actual physical space (and time) that exists in the neighborhood- thus, a spatial and temporal map of Gowanus.

Here are the grasses laid out on the floor of my studio, separated by street.

This section is the first two streets woven in- I wish there were a way that I could keep the grasses alive. This is my next hurdle to cross- preservation. If anyone out there has any words of wisdom or experience drying and preserving grasses, I'd love to hear them. The last three streets dried much better than the first two, as they were more stalks than true grass. This is something I will keep in mind for later pieces.

This is one of the flipbooks along with the fourth street seen behind it. I enjoy the flipbooks immensely- they are becoming a favorite way of dealing with movement and technology. They are handheld, tactile, and entirely self propelled ways of looking at video. This is just my kind of technology.

Loom Work

I have a piece that has been brewing for over a year now, and I'm finally ready to get started on it. It requires a tapestry loom, so I bought some 1x2s and got started building. It is a very simple, rudimentary design, but it will be functional, and is as much as I could accomplish as the wood shop in my studio isn't accessible at the moment. I drilled the boards together so it will be able to be dismantled when moving. Another project I am working on will be stained, so I used the tapestry loom to do a test of the stain color. The color will work for the other project, so I have a bit of wood protection and test staining done in one go! I warped the loom in two sections so that I can do some tests, but I still need to get the shed stick and heddle bars set up and then twine the warp ends to set the spacing. This has been on my list of things to do for some time now and it feels amazing to have this physical loom after all of this planning!


Another item on my to-do list was unsticking the 8th shaft on my Baby Wolf. When the loom arrived, the 8th shaft would raise and then stick halfway when the treadle was released. My guess was that either the shaft or the metal track was a bit warped. As I can do nothing for the metal track, I sanded down the top left side of the shaft and was able to fix the stickiness! What a relief, as it made for very messy sheds and my needing to manually push the shaft back down into place. Now onto the rest of my never ending to-do list!

sanding on the top left edge

You can see extra space around each of the shafts, except the 8th shaft (furthest to the left).