Volumes



Volume 7
Nature

We invited some of our favorite artists to write about the intersections between nature and culture as they appear in textile and fiber art. From  diaspora and home to queer possibility and  resilience amidst disaster, the writers within this issue highlight unexpected possibilities and tender moments.


Support for Feral Fabric Journal Volume 07 is provided by Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant Program






Labor

The work aspects of art have been mystified and alienated from their association with work. In this moment of reckoning for labor rights, we address the function of art within the larger labor movement and the fact of labor within art.


The Body

One of the more invisible casualties of the pandemic has been embodied experience. For this issue of the Feral Fabric Journal we contemplate the forgotten experiences of all that is corporeal, haptic, and visceral. From plant time to crip time, contributors consider the roles, regulations, and impressions made by bodies of the past and proposals for the future.



Language

Systems of language create the structures of understanding. They are the vehicles in which we share ideas, and they enable us to relate to one another. But these systems are not inherently neutral. In this issue we will explore the role language plays in creating meaning and identity – how it facilitates grief, humor.



New Utopias

Sci-fi, Fashion, and Imperfection / The Fábrica in Two Realities / Barbershop: The Art of Queer Failure / Police Uniforms Celestial and Terrestrial / A Manifesto for a Less Toxic Tomorrow



Vol. 00

A collection of online essays we put out as we sifted through our interests on the path to understanding what our project was really about.

Volumes


Volume 7
Nature

We invited some of our favorite artists to write about the intersections between nature and culture as they appear in textile and fiber art. From  diaspora and home to queer possibility and  resilience amidst disaster, the writers within this issue highlight unexpected possibilities and tender moments.


Support for Feral Fabric Journal Volume 07 is provided by Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant Program






Labor

The work aspects of art have been mystified and alienated from their association with work. In this moment of reckoning for labor rights, we address the function of art within the larger labor movement and the fact of labor within art.


The Body

One of the more invisible casualties of the pandemic has been embodied experience. For this issue of the Feral Fabric Journal we contemplate the forgotten experiences of all that is corporeal, haptic, and visceral. From plant time to crip time, contributors consider the roles, regulations, and impressions made by bodies of the past and proposals for the future.



Language

Systems of language create the structures of understanding. They are the vehicles in which we share ideas, and they enable us to relate to one another. But these systems are not inherently neutral. In this issue we will explore the role language plays in creating meaning and identity – how it facilitates grief, humor.



New Utopias

Sci-fi, Fashion, and Imperfection / The Fábrica in Two Realities / Barbershop: The Art of Queer Failure / Police Uniforms Celestial and Terrestrial / A Manifesto for a Less Toxic Tomorrow



Vol. 00

A collection of online essays we put out as we sifted through our interests on the path to understanding what our project was really about.

Select Artists

Mik and May Gaspay
by Kija Lucas
Rachel Youn

Megan Whitmarsh
Megan Whitmarsh
Tali Weinberg


Antonia Ablass
Kate Just
NIAD Art Center
Bill Bowers

Sheila Klein
Rosie Lee Tompkins
Ace Lehner

Carolina Magis Weinberg

Faith Ringgold by Kira Dominguez-Huntgren

Ryan Carrington
by Amy DiPlacido
Scarlet Tunkl
Sienna Freeman
Danielle Andress

Select Articles



Community through Camo: Weaving War Nets for the Ukrainian Front 
Paulina Berczynski


Maximalism, Camp, Queer Clown Core, & The New Gilded Baroque
Jackie Andrews


Seemingly Without End: Our Frictionless Future Mailee Hung


Social Action Considered
Through the Language of Textiles

Paulina Berczynski


Visually Absurd or
Absurdism = Dada, Existentialism, Nihilism
Amanda Walters



Official Frills
Angela Berry



The bond between textiles and nature spans millennia. For thousands of years, textiles were exclusively crafted from natural materials.
I've compiled a selection that showcases unique intersections between nature and textiles, offering new perspectives on their connection.



1. Grass on Rugs in a Castle

High-quality carpets are simply overgrown by grasses—a project in which nature takes on a role of disruptive force. The artist grew several different species of grass on an assortment of valuable rugs. Drawing on the representations of gardens that are commonplace on such rugs, the artist created a literal garden within a wide-open space in a castle. The work’s ephemerality and limited lifespan is matched by its inherently experiential quality—the sensual and time-based aspects of the work, such as the damp smell of the grass and its evolving growth, are difficult to appreciate through documentation. The ambivalence of this gesture recalls the futility that is often at the core of Martin Roth’s work, in which an action can be fruitless—in this case, the grass will die off and the rugs will be ruined.


Images: copyright 2023 Martin Roth, from his website

2. Green Shades

A rather technical project that I like because textiles enable the growth of plants in cities and contribute to the regeneration of nature. 


3. Modern Synthesis

This is where science and design create art. This new material has pretty cool properties and a new kind of aesthetic.



4. Interwoven

Here, the roots become textile elements and grow into interesting patterns.
Diana Scherer is a German-born visual artist living and working in Amsterdam.
Her practice encompasses botany, material research, and sculpture. Scherer explores the relationship of man versus his natural environment. Through her installations she examines the boundaries between plant culture and nature. What does “natural” mean in the Anthropocene and is man not also nature or a parasitic species on the rest of his environment? For the past few years her fascination has been focused on the dynamics of underground plant parts. She has been captivated by the root system, with its hidden, underground processes. By taking geometric and ordering principles from nature and combining them with traces of humans, Scherer poses a dilemma, as her craft is both a manipulation of natural processes and the possible cultivation of a common path.


Diana Scherer, Interwoven, 2021, installation view Frankfurter Kunstverein 2021, Photo: Norbert Miguletz, ©Frankfurter Kunstverein , Courtesy: the artist


5. Living Room

Plants intricately intertwined and assembled in a textile-like fashion, forming a cohesive structure or design.


6. Rewilding Textiles

There are so many research projects on natural colouring.
Here I like the combination of natural dyes, bacteria, and food waste used to create floral prints.




7. Seaweed Pavilion

Seaweed is the primary material to construct an eco-friendly pavilion, showcasing nature's versatile potential in architectural innovation.



Top: Julia Lohmann, Hidaka Ohmu (2020) and Corpus Maris II (2023), installation view Frankfurter Kunstverein 2023, Photo: Moritz Bernoully, ©Frankfurter Kunstverein, Courtesy: Julia Lohmann Studio
Bottom: Still from KFC - Kristineberg Fry Cone. Anne Hirvonen



8. Landscape Tapestry

Dried plants become a textile element and form interesting landscape-like surfaces
Olga Prinku is an artist, maker, and originator of the flowers-on-tulle embroidery craft. Author of Dried Flower Embroidery: An introduction to the art of flowers on tulle, published by Quadrille.


Dried Flower Wall Art Installation at Making Paradise, London 2021 (detail, installation view). Photography credit: Jonathan Goldberg.


9. My Canoe

I have seen many projects with fungus, but this is one of the most humorous. A canoe made of mycellium fibre that grows mushrooms every time it is used.

Katy Ayers paddles her canoe on a Nebraska lake. Courtesy Katy Ayers



10. Sprout

A dynamic living installation meticulously crafted through weaving techniques, showcasing an intricate interplay of organic elements woven together to form an immersive and vibrant display
Inspired by the contribution that fungi make to ecosystems, the London Flower School and their students created an installation that represented mycelia, the underground network of thin threads that connect plant material and fungus. This mixed media installation combined traditional craftsmanship such as weaving with floristry techniques. 





Antonia Ablass is a textile designer exploring the potential of using textiles to grow plants. Her work focuses on the human connection to nature, aiming to enhance this relationship by enabling urban environments to become greener spaces. In her approach, textiles not only fulfill an artistic role but also serve a technical function integral to her system's success. She is based in Halle (Saale), Germany.










Breath Plastic


By Tali Weinberg
Essay adapted from a paper presented at Praxis & Practice Digital Weaving Conference in Cleveland, OH in June 2023.


The extraction and burning of fossil fuels causes eerily parallel harm to trees and humans. While the climate crisis threatens one in six tree species in the continental US,1 one in six human deaths over the last five years is directly traceable to pollution.2
In the series Memories of Future Fires I explore the inextricability of these crises. I interweave petrochemical and plant-derived fibers into forms that connect fossil fuel extraction, forest fires, smoke inhalation, and the buildup of toxic plastics in our bodies and ecosystems. Each weaving starts with photos I took of dead trees in a fire-scarred landscape.


Fig 1. Trees photographed in Caldera, OR, used as the basis for weavings in Memories of Future Fires. On daily hikes during an artist residency in the Pacific Northwest, I was struck by stands of dead trees that stood like skeletons stripped clean by time, killed by wildfire years before my arrival. I was drawn, in particular, to this grouping, seemingly reaching their arms towards the sky, each other, and fellow trees lying at their feet.



As I reflect on how plants, people, plastics, and pollution shape—and are shaped by—each other, I look to weaving as a relational language that communicates between and beyond a binary understanding of nature/culture.




  • Fig 2. Lungs (2022), 86” x 112”, plant fibers, petrochemical-derived monofilament and dyes, photo courtesy of Rebecca Heidenberg, Dreamsong Gallery. As I reflect on interconnections between life-sustaining circulatory systems inside and outside the human body, I transform the trees into silhouettes that reference lungs and hearts.


Fig 3. Detail of Lungs. The trees are woven as silhouettes of dense, textured threads. These opaque areas contrast with porous, semi-transparent patterned backgrounds that reference cells and flames.

Relational Language


Any number of feminist, Indigenous, postcolonial, and environmental scholars have pointed to the harms that result when we see ourselves as separate from others and from the world around us—including the multitude of harms that add up to the climate crisis.3 Those with power, including fossil fuel companies, benefit when these relationships are obscured—when we instead understand the world as a series of false binaries between self and other or humans and nature. So, part of addressing ecological crises is retracing these intentionally obscured relationships.

Feminist philosopher Donna Haraway says:
“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” 4


The language we use to discuss the climate crisis shapes our understanding and response to it. So why use weaving as the story to tell this story with? Weaving, for me, is one way to sense and make sense of climate crisis—the science, the social-political dimensions, and entangled, multifaceted relationships to the more-than-human world. Retracing intentionally obscured relationships requires a language that communicates beyond binaries. Weaving is a relational language. It’s relational socially, ecologically, metaphorically, and tactile-y.




Fig 4. Most of my work in response to climate crisis has been woven with a similar set of structures. What changes is not the patterning so much as the color, material, and space between threads.

Some consider weaving a binary language, referring to whether a vertical thread passes over or under a horizontal. But weaving, for me, has never been binary. The outcome of the cloth has as much to do with color, texture, the space between threads, and the hand of the weaver as it does with whether a warp thread is up or down. Instead, I think of weaving as a language of relationships between all of the above, and I think of those intersections of warp and weft not as up and down but rather as points of connection and interaction.

These relationships extend outwards. While one might view weaving as an isolated studio practice, for me, weaving is a way to situate myself in the world, dependent on the functioning of complex ecosystems from water, soil, and insects to laborers, scientists, activists, and more. Like the crossing of warp and weft, weaving exists as and at intersections: intersections of domestic, industrial, and agricultural; of injustice and resistance; body and world, cerebral and embodied knowledge, individual and collective, capital and care. The final form and the meaning of the cloth is these relationships.


Fig 5. Detail of Traces 2

Tracing the relationships embodied in weaving is one way to trace relationships between plants, people, plastics, and pollution. 



Image and Material


Memories of Future Fires is a tactile interweaving of corporeal and ecological bodies. While the imagery is a legible entry point for viewers, the relationships between material, color, and structure, and the process of building up the image line-by-line, matter just as much to the story this work tells. The warp threads of the rematerialized trees are industrially dyed black cotton. The wefts are petrochemical-derived plastic monofilament.


Fig 6. detail of Traces 1 (2021), 83” x 88”, plant fibers, petrochemical-derived monofilament and dyes. As I experimented with various ways to rematerialize the images of trees I was drawn to monofilament, in part, because it allowed me to create ghostly, porous bodies—forms that felt resonant as I reflected on loss and the anticipation of future loss in the context of fire and climate crisis.



Breath


Trees are vital to human and ecosystem health. They sequester carbon, mitigate pollution, and moderate rising temperatures.

We learn as children that breathing is an interconnected act: trees are counterparts to our breath—inhaling CO2 and exhaling oxygen, as we exhale CO2 and inhale oxygen. When trees die, so do we.5


Fig 7 Breath Plastic (2022), 86” x 109”, plant fibers, petrochemical-derived monofilament and dyes, photo courtesy of Rebecca Heidenberg, Dreamsong Gallery.

Extraction, Plastics, and Pollution


As we and trees breathe, we encounter particulates, including microplastics. As toxicants accumulate in the air, they also accumulate in our bodies, leading to accumulations of illnesses like cancers, endocrine disorders, and respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

As Max Liboiron lays out in the introduction to Pollution is Colonialism: “You can’t ‘clean up’ plastics because they exist in geologic time, and cleaning just shuffles them in space as they endure in time. You can’t recycle them out of the way… and there is no “away” at any rate… Many of the chemicals associated with plastics, called endocrine disruptors, defy thresholds…  Plastics and their chemicals defy containment… They blow, flow and off-gas so that their pollutants are ubiquitous in every environment tested.”6 

The porosity of bodies intersects with the toxic materiality of air. As blood moves oxygen, it also circulates the toxicants we encounter, whether smoke from fires or microplastics. Woven with petrochemical-derived monofilament, the trees become materializations of this invisible buildup of plastics in our bodies, air, and ecosystems.7


Fig 8 Arterial (2022), 86” x 89”, plant fibers, petrochemical-derived monofilament and dyes
Fig 9 Detail of Arterial. The weavings cast patterned shadows as light passes through their porous bodies.


Fig 10 Detail of Lungs



Underlying Structures


The monofilament weft also serves to reveal the underlying structures of the cloth—leaving the warp threads fully visible. It is the nonbinary, relational qualities of weaving mentioned above that makes this possible. As warp threads are raised and lowered, the weft pulls some threads together and pushes others apart. But it is the space between threads— sett (density) of the warp—that allows for this movement. And it is the transparency of the weft that renders the aforementioned visible.

By tangibly revealing these usually invisible woven structures, I weave a material metaphor for other often unseen, interconnected structures embodied in the work: circulatory systems, the microplastics we breathe, and the systems tethering us to fossil fuels.

Fig 11 Traces 2 (2022), 86” x 92”, plant fibers, petrochemical-derived monofilament and dyes, photo courtesy of Form and Concept Gallery


Fig 12 detail of Traces 2. Traces 2 and Arterial are woven with multicolored monofilament. This subtle rainbow of red, orange, pink, yellow, and blue over the black warp nods to the colors of fire, or an oil slick.


Fig 13 Detail of woven study for Memories of Future Fires.

Looking at the plastic weft pushing the cotton warp back and forth, one could view these weavings as metaphors for how extraction and plastics shape our lives. But there is another metaphor worth considering—another lesson from these weavings about relationships in and to the world: A warp under tension gives the impression of rigidity. But in these pieces, one can see that the warp is less rigid than perceived. The weft—the threads controlled by the hands of a weaver—pushes and pulls the warp at each point of intersection. Woven cloth exists as thousands of points of relation. And at each of these intersections—each push and pull—there is flexibility amidst perceived rigidity, possibility amidst constraint, and futurity amidst grief. At every point of connection in the systems we navigate, there is capacity for change.

Memories of Future Fires was produced with the support of a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.




1 Sarah Kaplan, “As many as one in six U.S. tree species is threatened with extinction,” Washington Post, August 23, 2022

2 Kasha Patel, “Pollution caused 1 in 6 deaths globally for five years, study says,” Washington Post, May 17, 2022

3 Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, Graywolf Press, 2021. p 189

4 Donna Haraway, Staying with The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016. p 12

5 Lewis Thomas, “Exploring Connections Between Trees and Human Health,” Science Findings, United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Issue 158, Jan/Feb 2014. Summary of research by scientist Geoffrey Donavan on the direct link between the Emerald Ash Borer killing of ash trees and a marked increase in deaths from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

6 Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism, Duke University Press, 2021, p. 16-17

7 Damian Carrington, “Microplastics found in human blood for first time.” The Guardian, March 24, 2022

8 Damian Carrington, “Revealed: air pollution may be damaging ‘every organ in the body,” The Guardian, May 17, 2019 + Janice Brahney, “You’re Probably Inhaling Microplastics Right Now,” New York Times, June 25, 2020





Backdrop: Rachel Youn, installation view of Greener than grass at Truman State University Art Gallery, 2022. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Karl Ramberg

Video: No Pain No Gain, 2022. Courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters

Wavering Stems and Aural Buzz Refashioning a queer ecology in the work of Rachel Youn


By Ava Morton

Frenetic energy is abound in the sculptural work by Rachel Youn. Vibrant faux plants gyrate with the aid of their fabricated appendages, animating the inanimate while subverting functionality to craft a queer ecology.


Throughout Youn’s sculptural and installation work, artificial plants are inserted into old shiatsu massagers. Youn builds an environment of cast-off consumer goods, giving them a new purpose outside of conventional assignment. In doing so, these objects are liberated from the static determination, quivering with the newfound potential.

In 10,000 hours, two faux birds of paradise rotate in circles within the confines of a metal music stand powered by a bygone shiatsu massager. The unexpected arrangement of these objects and their restless movements subvert expectations around their function. Here, the objects are anthropomorphized by both their wavering stems and the aural clicks, brushes, and buzzing of the motor. This kinetic sculpture, born from the cast-offs of yesterday’s capitalist darlings, is tenacious. Despite the labored and awkward sways of its stem, it persists. The endurance of this sculpture is underscored by its title, 10,000 hours, which is commonly understood as the amount of time it takes to achieve mastery of a complex skill or vocation.


Rachel Youn, 10,000 hours, 2022, shiatsu massager, artificial plants, wire stand, 39 x 21.5 x 16 inches.
However, the sculpture’s tireless movements seem to be in service of building an energetic community, like the vast underground root network of trees in a grove. Exposed power cords trace a constellation of circuits transferring electric pulses from sculpture to sculpture. Youn’s decision to highlight the interconnectivity between the works in the gallery underscores a sense of comradery among the pieces.


Rachel Youn, installation view of No Pain No Gain, 2022. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters



Long stalks of a variety of fake flora, affixed to shiatsu massagers, dance among each other. Small fake flowers tremble with each cycle of the sculpture’s varying vibrations, asynchronistic yet inextricably linked. Each piece is made up of cast-off consumer items that wiggle with the gentle mechanical cadence of the bygone massager.

That all of the pieces are powered by the same device—a massager—evokes a sense of intimacy. The massager is meant to touch skin, kneading tight muscles until they release tension. Here, devoid of flesh, the machine uses its energy to lift and sway the found materials in an exuberant dance, alluding to the history of this particular era of massagers as an object used to derive covert sexual pleasure before the ubiquity of sex toys. This material subversion is a focal point and source of power. The erotic relationship between these objects is no longer hidden but celebrated in this environment. 


Rachel Youn, installation view of Greener than grass at Truman State University Art Gallery, 2022. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Karl Ramberg



Youn’s installation, Greener than grass, builds upon the themes of a celebration of queer intimacy. The installation, comprised of over twenty plant-massager sculptures arranged in two sections, borrows the religious environment and turns it into a dance party. Each flower-massager quivers in two rows, facing a lectern with a microphone and amplifier. One tall frayed palm thwacks against the wall to the hum of the machines, resembling an impassioned pastor. The visual arrangement echoes a church service while the title, Greener than grass, conjures a sense of queer joy, as it is a line from Sappho's fragment 31.



Rachel Youn, detail of Greener than grass at Truman State University Art Gallery, 2022. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Karl Ramberg


One of Sappho's most famous fragments, thought to be an account of experiencing love between women, describes an experience of love where her eyes, ears, tongue, and skin cease to function due to the intensity of attraction. Similarly, Youn’s plant-massagers function in a manner outside of their “intended” design, finding new purpose and belonging.

“A cold sweat covers me,
Trembling seizes my body,
And I am greener than grass.
Lacking but little of death do I seem.”1


Wrapped in a chorus of vibration and thumping the floral participants exude joy and pain, connected by a web of electricity. Bearing the same determination as the sculptures throughout Youn’s work, these pieces work together to become unmoored from the confines of what is expected to forge a queer ecology.



1 Sappho, The Complete Poems of Sappho. Translated by Willis Barnstone, Internet Archive, Boston : Shambhala : Distributed in the United States by Random House, 1 Jan. 1970




Ava Morton (she/her) is an artist, writer, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ava’s writing and artistic practices are entwined and often focus on archives, linguistics, sound, and the boundaries of the body. Her artistic practice is interdisciplinary, stemming from archival research and often manifests as sculpture, installation, and video. In her most recent sound and installation-based work, she teases out the friction between collective and personal memory; she is currently fashioning sound collages spliced together from found audio, her recordings taken in transit, and recordings from family archives. She has exhibited in various art spaces including, Minnesota Street Project, Embark Gallery, Root Division, Pitzer College Art Gallery, Canyon Cinema Salon, PLAySPACE Gallery, and Hubble Street Gallery. Her writing has been published in Sightlines and 48hills.

Ava is a graduate of UC Santa Barbara with a BFA in Studio Art and Biological Anthropology and of California College of the Arts with a dual MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies.




The Classifieds






Megan Whitmarsh is an LA based artist



Letter from the Guest Editor



There was once a wall of roses that climbed up a chainlink fence at the end of an alley. My grandmother called them her rambling roses. She planted them in a small patch of dirt along a stone wall, these roses that grew from concrete, blooming their sweetness and vibrancy from within the urban monochrome.

This was over three decades ago, and the roses have long since died. My family moved to a new apartment, and there was no longer anyone to care for the plants. Such are the effects of this transitory experience of home. Their lives of rich color and scent, and my grandmother’s tender labor that coaxed out such abundance, exist only in photographs and the hazy fog of memory.

What happens, as Kija Lucas poses in her essay about Mik and May Gaspay’s quilts, to all that was held in a home that is no longer our own? Their lush textile work creates a snapshot-permanence of both the physical structure of a home and the surrounding botanicals, which will too live and die.

Living on the West Coast in our contemporary moment, fire season keeps the losses in and of our landscapes top of mind. Tali Weinberg’s Memories of Future Fires features photographs of fire-impacted landscapes in the Pacific Northwest hand-woven as hanging textiles. Using industrially-produced cotton and plastic monofilament in her weavings, Weinberg implores the inextricability of climate change and environmental disaster with the extractive and destructive industrial systems that produce the vast majority of objects that comprise our lives.

A close friend unexpectedly passed away this fall. She was an avid home gardener in a particularly foggy part of the Bay Area; it was sustained daily labor to keep gophers and rats out of the plant beds and move plants inside or wrap them up as good weather ebbed and flowed. She would bring me lemons, cucumbers, strawberries, and blueberries. I was shocked to find such an abundance of life from such a wet, cool place. We recently went looking for fruit trees that might do well with her extra care—passion fruit and mandarin oranges. After her passing, I inquired with her son about the state of her garden. There was a deeper pit in the well of this loss as I wondered about whether any of her garden would survive.

She hadn’t found the right fruit tree yet, and her death serendipitously occurred in a quieter part of the year, with many seasonal plants also at the end of their lifespans. The garden will continue to live, reimagined with local plants that can thrive in the coastal fog with less tending.

The work of death, left to those who remain, is so much comprised of figuring out what to do with all the things we leave behind. Books, electronics, kitchen utensils, shoes, emails, tchotchkes, bills, notebooks, plants, shoes. And clothes—all of someone’s clothes. The clothes worn every day and the clothes kept to hold onto moments since past. What happens to the piles of textiles that no longer have a home?

Paulina Berczynski writes on the collective action to weave camouflage nets for soldiers on the frontlines of Ukraine, using donated textile material and collaborative weaving. Discarded cloth, through the careful and caring labor of participatory labor, can find new purpose in the work of protection and resistance. Artist Rachel Youn also finds possibility in the discards of global capitalism—using artificial plants and vibrating massagers to create, as writer Ava Morton explores, a queer ecology that is itself an act of liberation. The writers within the issue process ideas of home, grief, climate crises, and war, something not far from anyone’s mind while we watch as the fight for humanity in Gaza brutally unfolds. 

This volume of Feral Fabric makes visible some of these intersections between textiles and the natural world: wefts of home and diaspora, of liberatory labor, of queer possibility, of global capitalism and industry, of new lives from old things, of resilience amidst disaster.




Tamara Suarez Porras (they/she) is an artist, writer, and educator from (south) Brooklyn, NY, and based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

tamara’s work examines experiences of knowing, remembering, and forgetting, working across photography, writing, installation, filmmaking, and performance. tamara has exhibited nationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, School at the International Center of Photography, En Foco Touring Gallery, and Deitch Projects in New York City, as well as fusedspace, Root Division, The Growlery, and Embark Gallery in San Francisco, CA. tamara’s writing has been published on The Brooklyn Rail, Art Practical, and 48hills.

tamara is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Photography+Imaging and Journalism and of California College of the Arts with a dual MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies. tamara is a Lecturer in the Art Practice department at Stanford University, and has also taught at the University of San Francisco, California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State University, and the International Center of Photography. tamara is a member of Black Hole Collective Film Lab and the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure.


Cover image and top: from Porras’ series elipsis (ongoing, cropped) Above: To locate where we both exist from Porras’ series that which we can not ever expect to see






Images throughout courtesy of the artists and the author

Balikbayan


By Kija Lucas


“Balikbayan. Its literal translation is return (balk) home/country (bayan) it’s a term used to distinguish Filipinos who have lived/worked overseas and return home.  Me and my mom are balikbayans and we look back at our old home and remember it through our quilted works.”
- Mik Gaspay

Depending on who is telling the story, the meaning of home can change. It might conjure the shape of a structure or the feeling of a warm hug. It might evoke the taste of a favorite meal or the smell of wet sidewalk. Some homes hold footsteps of our ancestors; the laughter of children might echo off the walls. Others hold hard things, things unspoken, bottled up, or sealed away. Most homes hold any and all of these things.

When a house no longer stands, or new residents have moved in, where do we hold all that was once found in that place? What do we pass on to future generations?
May and Mik Gaspay, are a mother and son who collaborate on quilted objects. Each of the artists approaches quilting from a very different perspective. Mik is an artist whose previous works in print and sculpture are more conceptually oriented. And May, who has in-depth experience with quilting, is more mathematical. Each had to learn the push and pull, not only of navigating family dynamics in collaboration, but also, of the just so geometric traditions of quilting and the wild possibilities of bucking those traditions to make three dimensional structures and organic botanical shapes that escape the two dimensional form. Without the back and forth of the collaboration, these works may become too geometric and mathematical or too organic and wild, “but,” as Mik Gaspay explains, “the strength of the foundation holds so that I can be messy without jeopardizing the whole piece.”




Their work together began by creating quilts of May’s grandfather’s home in the Philippines. This home, depicted in a large four panel quilt hanging away from the wall, housed generations of family members over time. By the time they began quilting, the jungle had long ago claimed the structure of the house, a loss at once beautiful and devastating. This home—where May grew up and several generations of their family had lived—was now gone.

When the physical building does not exist we must find other ways to hold and pass on stories.


While quilts are common domestic objects, Mik felt less of an attachment to the tradition, “it is not really part of my family history or tradition… it is more of a tradition that we are adopting.” 




Pintuan, or The Door, is a quilt in two panels. One is at an angle to the wall, a front door made from fabric printed with the textures of wood in shades of brown and embroidered with names of the family members who lived in the home. The other quilt, parallel to the wall, depicts the jungle, with bright and deep green, brown, blue, fabric pieces sewn and quilted in the shape of botanicals. Pintuan makes space for us, the outside, to come inside.

Stepping between the open door and this threshold to spend time with the piece is an intimate gesture. There is only space for one person at a time to get close enough to see the work’s detail. The quilted botanicals layered atop one another break free from a traditional quilt. The edges are exposed, and sometimes fall away from the piece, adding movement and plantness. A monstera leaf, printed in fabric, is cut out and attached with applique. Other quilted plants are stuffed with batting and become three-dimensional. Colorful pieces of fabric are cut out and sewn together in the shape of leaves. 







A quilt, functionally used to keep warm and generally at home, is often passed down and gifted between generations. The quilt becomes art within and depicting the home, a new way to hold stories, and memories. It is a mode to pass on home from generation to generation. Long after the natural world reclaimed the childhood house of May Gaspay, Ancestral Home, became a new place to hold the feeling of home.







San Francisco Bay Area artist Kija Lucas uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage, and inheritance. She is interested in how ideas are passed down and seemingly inconsequential moments create changes that last generations. Lucas has exhibited her work at The Guardhouse with For-Site, SF Camerawork, Oakland Museum of California, and the International Center for Photography. She has been an artist in residence at Montalvo Arts Center and Recology San Francisco. Lucas is currently the curator of the Arts at CIIS.

Shown above and below: work from Lucas’ series Still, Life



Documentation of students in the main weaving studio at the Łódż Academy of FIne Arts, working on war nets for the Ukrainian war front in March, 2022. Photo: Marcin Stępień for Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Community through Camo:

Weaving War Nets for the Ukrainian Front


By Paulina Berczynski

Since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War, thousands of volunteers and war refugees in Ukraine, Poland, and other European nations have contributed their labor to make hand-woven camouflage nets for Ukrainian soldiers.

In March of 2023 I visited a community of textile artists in Łódź, Poland, who are creating nets to send to their neighboring country. These current actions build upon a weaving effort that started in 2014 during the Russian separatist attack on the Donbas region of Ukraine, and the annexation of Crimea. Whereas the work was initially contributed to exclusively by community groups of Ukrainian women, who worked on the nets “pretty much every day except Sundays”1, the project has grown to an international scale since the start of the 2022 Russian invasion. The day after the Russian attack, impromptu weaving “factories” began to spring up in spaces ranging from armories and library basements to traditional art spaces such as studios, galleries, and museums.


Students and faculty cutting fabric and weaving nets during a community work day. Courtesy of the group Polish Textile Art / Polska Sztuka Włókna-Tkanina, Facebook. March 2, 2022. 

The process begins with donated fabric and clothing which is sorted by color and cut into strips. These strips are then woven by hand onto vertically hung square-mesh netting such as safety netting or repurposed volleyball and soccer nets. The finished nets are then sent off to the troops, who commission them to address specific wartime needs.
I follow several Polish textile-art pages on social media, and happened upon some images of students and faculty at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź weaving nets immediately after the start of the war. I was struck by the way that these art spaces, students, and materials were mobilized into the war effort. The division between textile art and craft—the evolution of fiber art from domestic textiles and other useful, hand-crafted forms—has been a great interest in academic circles, but the conversation and practice rarely runs backwards.

It is unusual for art students to spend their studio days weaving massive industrial cloths by hand, but in this case, formal skills and equipment were suddenly repurposed from the world of experimentation and study in service of something physically necessary and useful. The medium and practice was reverse-engineered to allow for this craft-based, purpose-driven production.


In the 2022/2023 academic year I was making work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódż, a post-industrial city with a deep connection to textiles, having been a major producer of commercial and industrial fabrics for the USSR through the 1980s. I was there through a Fulbright Grant, researching the Polish School of Textiles from the 1960-70s. 

The radicality of Polish textiles in that era, exemplified in the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz, also came in response to war. This movement largely concerned gender, form, and scale. In the Polish School of Textile Art, a number of female artists, working with what little was available after the Second World War, combined innovative materials and techniques to revolutionize the field of fiber art.2 Materials such as sisal, rope, and twine were worked using intuitive, textural hand-weaving at monumental scale. Previous to this shift, fine art tapestry had been a male-dominated field which essentially reproduced the paintings of famous artists into woven form using a “cartoon” stencil-like reproduction technique. After the shock of the first Lausanne International Biennale of Tapestry in 1962, where the first of this new style of work debuted, the field evolved into what many now associate with contemporary fiber art, wherein original compositions often present in some combination of woven, imperfect, experimental, or textural, and are made or shown in a vertical orientation. The Polish School of Textiles evolved against a background of Soviet occupation and status-quo, working within these systems to radically change the field of textile art.


From top left: 1. The first Lausanne Biennale in 1962 with Abakanowicz’s Composition of White Forms shown on the right, Alice Pauli archives  2. Abakanowicz with her work, 1962. Photo: Francoise Rapin. 3. Abakanowicz’s Abakan Yellow, 1967 in the Tate Modern’s retrospective Every Tangle of Thread and Rope, 2023. 4. Abakanaowicz with her students in the textile studio at the University of the Arts, Poznań. Photo courtesy of Dr. Anna Goebel.

The weaving of war nets in Łódż started when lecturers from the Lviv National Academy of Art sent photos to colleagues at the Academy of Fine Arts with the request: “We sew masking nets for Ukrainian civilians, we run out of material. Help.”3 Volunteers initially wove nets intended to hide civilians and the entrances to bomb shelters from Russian bombardment in Lviv. By the time I arrived in the Fall of 2022, the effort was devoted to fulfilling production requests for the military—soldiers needed specific sizes of nets to hide equipment and trenches from drone attacks, and to serve as tents.

Documentation of a student in the main weaving studio at the Łódż Academy of Fine Arts, working on war nets for the Ukrainian war front in March, 2022. Photo: Marcin Stępień for Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Aside from variations in size, different colors suit wilderness and urban settings, and the nets’ tone  shifts to better reflect the seasons (more grey for winter, brown for fall). However, since the Ukrainian nets rely on material donations, almost everything that is not too bright or shiny is eventually woven in. The most important things are to weave erratically to avoid making patterns, and not to leave any gaps in the cloth.

There are many variations of camouflage developed by the world’s nations based on differences in native flora, topography, and other natural features.4 The most used colors in the Ukrainian war nets are found in the traditional American “woodland” and “multicam” camouflage—earth tones, neutrals, and greens. Image courtesy of Camopedia

The LOOK Gallery weaving venue, on the campus at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódż, Poland. April, 2023
After the initial wave of support, daily net production at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź was mostly carried out by a handful of Ukrainian refugees and staff at LOOK Gallery on campus. However, the venue was open to volunteers during regular business hours, and newcomers were invited to join in at any time. Several weaving workshops were also offered during the European Textile Network Conference (ETN) which held its annual meeting in Łódz in March of 2023. Many conference goers were, like me, academics and artists from Western nations, eager for the chance to participate in a fight that they supported, but from which they were personally far removed. The nets are an outlet and a way to show solidarity against occupation. They provided an opportunity to help the Ukrainian effort in an immediate, physical way.

I usually found my way to the weaving gallery when I knew no one else would be present, as I preferred weaving alone to the performative aspect I associated with weaving in a group (particularly as a visiting outsider from the US). Tea and sweets were always on hand, as were the precut strips of fabric. In-progress nets were held taut by the weight of big bottles of water; shifting bundles of donated materials and completed nets filled the corners of the room; even the boxes of sweets on the table all reflected the banality and dailiness of the war.
Bundles of completed nets ready to be shipped to the front.
Camouflage is usually synthetic and machine-made, but intended to mimic the patterns, colors and seasons of the natural world. And like nature it can be cruel; used to hide and attack, its associations with conflict are clear. Through the production of the nets, however, a camouflage object acquires new associations—of collectivity and solidarity against violence and occupation. Like the reverse-engineering of textile art into a purpose-driven form in the Academy, the reverse-engineering of camo from industrial and detached to hand-made and personal is unexpected and remarkable.
Ukrainian women weaving camouflage war nets in the basement of a museum in Kyiv. Some of the volunteers here have been weaving nets for the front since 2014. Screengrab courtesy of The Washington Post, youtube

As of this writing, international weaving efforts in support of Ukraine have mostly concluded. The women in the Donbas region of Ukraine, however, have been making camo nets for 10 years, resisting occupation through weaving by hand. These nets symbolize the potential of participation and collective action around a shared goal and values. Their production has brought an inherent, physical radicality into unexpected spaces and contexts.


1 Nadija Lystopad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK9rbyMX5q0

2  Marta Kowalewska, Michał Jachuła & Irena Huml (2018) The Polish School of Textile Art, TEXTILE: A Journal of Cloth and Culture, 16:4, 412-419, DOI: 10.1080/14759756.2018.1447074

3 “Artyści na pomoc mieszkańcom Lwowa. Na ASP w Łodzi studenci i wykładowcy tkają siatki maskujące”. 04.03.2022, Wyborcza.pl / Łódż. By Sandra Kmieciak. Translation by DeepL.

4 Camopedia: Camouflage patterns by region, country, and use
See comment by Tim Kerk for “woodland” and “Multicam” examples

Further Viewing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYlaqxtNQho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLtc1WxNlwQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkSzLbeoFGE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK9rbyMX5q0




Paulina Berczynski is a Berlin-based Polish-American artist, and co-founder of Feral Fabric. In her studio work, workshops, and site-specific projects, she often employs fabric collage to facilitate exchange between people from different backgrounds and communities. She is influenced by traditional forms such as quilts and domestic crafts, movements for social justice, utopianism (with all of its personal and cultural complications), and the aesthetics and resistance of occupied 1970-80s Poland.

Paulina’s work is informed by her past as a child immigrant and refugee who moved many times through different languages and socio-economic realities. She is a 2022 recipient of Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure grant for Feral Fabric Journal, and a 2023 resident at Prelinger Library, where she focused on Utopian communities in California. In April 2024 she will be an Artist in Residence in Zusa's What's Next program, exploring new ideas of solidarity in Europe.




Volume 7 
Nature


We invited some of our favorite artists to write about the intersections between nature and culture as they appear in textile and fiber art. From  diaspora and home to queer possibility and  resilience amidst disaster, the writers within this issue highlight unexpected possibilities and tender moments.

Support for Feral Fabric Journal Volume 07 is provided by Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant Program






Mark

Volume 7
Nature

We invited some of our favorite artists to write about the intersections between nature and culture as they appear in textile and fiber art. From  diaspora and home to queer possibility and  resilience amidst disaster, the writers within this issue highlight unexpected possibilities and tender moments.


Support for Feral Fabric Journal Volume 07 is provided by Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant Program









Feral Fabric is the collaborative work of artists Paulina Berczynski and Amanda Walters. We bring forward ideas, conversations, and workshops that combine our interests in textiles, contemporary art, and personal and cultural transformation.

Feral Fabric Journal
is a scholarly periodic journal highlighting radical textile production in art, activism, and countercultural movements. The journal has been published online since 2018.


Feral Fabric has led textile-based workshops and projects with institutions including Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley Art Center, Southern Exposure’s Youth Advisory Council, and NIAD Art Center. From 2020-2022 Feral Fabric worked on Story Quilts, a narrative quilting and DIY craft project with unhoused communities and individuals in the Bay Area. Feral Fabric supports critical thinking about capitalist and socially-normative structures, and promotes inclusion of people and progressive voices and values. 



Paulina Berczynski is a Polish-American artist and designer working with textiles, social practice, printmaking, and design. Her work references domestic textiles, folk arts, and crafts as a way to centers ideas of encounter, collectivity and exchange. She received her MFA in Social Practice from California College of the Arts, and her BFA in Communication Design from Carnegie Mellon University. She has led textile-based projects in Łódż (Poland), Berlin (Germany), and with many California art institutions including High Desert Test Sites (Joshua Tree), Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley), and Southern Exposure (San Francisco). She is currently developing several participatory, web-based, and surface design projects. She is based in Berlin.

Amanda Walters is a writer, sculptor, and textile artist from south Florida. Her work explores the strange and well manicured history of her home state, the intersections of landscape and capitalism, social ecology, and the fantasies embedded in tourism. Walters received her MFA in Studio Practice and MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts, and her BFA with emphasis in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, Berkeley Art Center, Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, San Francisco Arts Commision, and Southern Exposure in San Francisco, among other places.



Contact us! feralfabric@gmail.com
Follow us! @feralfabric


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