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This piece is part of the exhibition Innovative Threads: Contemporary Weaving on at the Alberta Craft Gallery - Calgary from January 25 to April 12, 2025.
"In my current series of weavings, the source material is a collection of blurred and abstracted photographs captured unseen with my smartphone while walking after work at dusk. In the habit of keeping my phone in my hand for safety, I began noticing the intense quality of light at dusk, so I captured the images without breaking my brisk stride. The resulting photographs became an abstraction and exploration of color, light, shadow and unexpected shapes.
Working with a TC2 Digital Loom, there can also be an assumption of automation and the removal of human work with digital processes. When talking about the digital loom, many will assume that the loom is fully automated and that it will weave the designs for you, and that Photoshop can instantly create the image you desire.
While the images may have come to be in an instant, the resulting weavings were far from that. The threading, planning, and weave structure preparation can be slow and time consuming. I edited these quickly captured images in Photoshop to carefully break apart the tonal values and hues, then apply weave structures that would translate the colour and gradations in interesting ways. And these can be difficult to translate, and many weaving tests were involved: testing different structures, colours, and settings to achieve the imagery. And with any computer system, much troubleshooting and adjusting finicky details on the machine that can and do go awry.
And while these were woven on a digital loom, it is still a hand-weaving loom. I stand at the loom and pass the shuttle across the warp, one thread at a time. Each thread has its own heddle, and they move according to the Photoshop file with its binary of black and white pixels that tell the loom which threads to lift for each line of the image. It is an evolution—and full circle—from the early punch-card looms, the binary system that has grown into our computers, and the phones in our pockets that we may use to quickly capture the light one night on a brisk walk home."
2024
54 x 70 x 1 cm
Pairs well with
