Textile Society of America

 

Date of this Version

10-2020

Citation

Published in Hidden Stories/Human Lives: Proceedings of the Textile Society of America 17th Biennial Symposium, October 15-17, 2020. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/

doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.tsasp.0087

Comments

Copyright © 2020 Gabe Duggan

Abstract

This presentation demonstrates various ways in which the TC1 has supported my work’s exploration of tension, balance, and precarity. By embracing and pushing expectations of traditional fiber work, these weavings question inequalities within contemporary performances of gender and exhibitions of power. My work on the TC1/TC2 digital jacquard loom has been primarily tethered to one specific machine with which I have shared a personal past and future for just over a decade. Through this technology I have built and negated tension, challenging a broad range of power dynamics. My work with this TC1 seeks to exploit and balance this technology as a means to construct cloth that both digital design and the hand can co-inhabit. By balancing these two technologies (hand/space and digital/time) with the TC1, I have been able to challenge definitions of cloth itself. Approaching this work as a collaboration between artist and machine has presented the opportunity for me to consider a specific loom with which I have been working for twelve years. Over this time, I have watched the machine’s operations waver as it passed through different hands, most recently to be neglected for significant periods of time. Together, this machine and I work to construct both object and image resulting in a glitched, questionable “cloth” rich with contemporary metaphor.

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