2019

Vessels In Ultra-Gushy Historical Color

Eri silk, beeswax, cochineal, weld and logwood dye

8 panels, 23 x 72 in. ea.

Photos by Nina Johnson. 

Made for In Situ: Site-Specific Textile Installations
Presented by Stockpiler and the Hoxton Hotel, for
Portland Textile Month

Vessels hold. Cracked vessels hold, slip, spill, break, and come to hold something else. Curvy pitchers with willful arms and full-bellied amphoras stretch across silk panels installed in street level windows on SW Burnside. Each silk is hand-painted with beeswax, and dyed in deep colors cooked from cochineal beetles, weld, and logwood shavings. I then burn poetic text and fracture lines into some of the vessels with a laser engraving machine. Text and textile work like fractures to crack open ridgid histories. This way of working is informed by my experience of surviving, and ultimately breaking, cycles of domestic abuse. Vessel Series explores what is created through shattering.

Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s discussion of Silas Marner’s earthenware pot in “Fragile Connections,” Living a Feminist Life.

Photos by Nina Johnson.

Transcription of poems burned into silk in my handwriting using a laser engraving machine:


SLIP
SPILL
LEAK
            LET




POROUS BODIES SLIP
IN BRUSHY MEETINGS




STICKY WORDS,
COME UP
OUT MY MOUTH.




TO HOLD,                            TO SPILL,                        TO BREAK,
                  AND TO HOLD                    SOMETHING
ELSE             




UNBRUISE
HER
BODY!




COCOON
                ME
            IN
                SHARED
     SPACE




NO SHAME
IN A WORMY NEED
TO BE HELD

       I KEEP MY RAW EDGE.