Textile Society of America
Date of this Version
2010
Abstract
What is it to be located? What are the markers of communication that travel with us, or that we seek locally? Recent art practices that address notions of geography, migration, settlement and travel in an increasingly ‘globalized’ and mediatized world are presented in this paper. With Montreal, Canada as the site of location, this research explores ways in which experience intermingles in the poetics of visual translation of ‘real world’ imagery into textile-based responses. Travel and ‘the local’ suggests a map, a rhizome, consisting of multiple entry points “entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real”, as Deleuze and Guattari have observed. That the map is an ever-shifting terrain, conceived as a garden or work of art, woven as a political action or meditation, with potential to be reworked by an individual, group or social formation suggests the instability of identity, locality and of mapping.
Focusing on interdisciplinary approaches to constructing cultural objects or experiences, this paper explores ways embodied knowledge affects both production and the sites in which stories are told. In particular, the impact of analogue and digitally assisted, cyborgian practices are compared in regards to bodily experience and subsequent haptic responses. These are textiles that conceptually navigate borders and traverse locality, mapping new meanings at the intersections of the corporeal, theoretical and material.
Comments
Presented at “Textiles and Settlement: From the Plains Space to Cyber Space,” Textile Society of America 12th Biennial Symposium, Lincoln, Nebraska, October 6-9, 2010. Copyright 2010 Textile Society of America