Tapestry #1: Linear Narrative
Embroidered May 2021-May 2022
Embroidery Floss on Cotton
62”x19"
My first large-scale embroidered work, Tapestry #1: Linear Narrative, is a meditative exploration of time and intuition rendered onto a seven-foot slab of cotton. When I started the project, I did not have a predetermined design in mind, but I knew I wanted to create something that followed a single stitched line across the expanse of fabric, trusting that patterns and aberrations would emerge from a half-subconscious mind-hand-needle connection. In doing so, I wanted to develop a representation of a certain temporal experience, of linearity, that isn’t reduced to a commentary on banality, as thinking about linear time often is. Utilizing a set of constraints (the single line, roughly two arms-lengths of any color floss at a time, only right-ish angles), I show how a totally linear experience of time (and, in correlation, artistic labor) isn’t, or isn’t just, a site of exploitation, of patriarchocapitalism, but a potential opening to a deliberate, unexpected, and defamiliarized experience of the world as it moves through us one second, one stitch at a time.
I expand on this concept in the second phase of this project, which is the stop-motion animation Linear Narrative, which uses this tapestry as material for a structuralist film following the single line of the tapestry across its entire run. You can see more of that phase of the project here.
