My graffiti tapestry is complete (earlier posts about the process are here and here). For me, it is a reminder of the feeling in the city in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Most plywood protective boards, painted or otherwise, have been removed from neighborhood walls and windows now, by mid-summer. Some remain on businesses that won’t recover, and a few remain up on stores that are open, generally those that are signed art. But during the first days, I was struck by the immediacy of the words in bright paint.
This post is about my design process, and some comments about weaving in the style of Frida Hansen. I am writing partly for my own documentation, and for the–oh, three or four weavers out there who might read to the end!
How could I capture the scrawling, sprawling look of that graffiti in a wool transparency technique? I chose an important phrase that showed up on several buildings. How would the lettering work with open warp? I decided to weave the letters, and leave the outlining of the letters in open warp. That meant that there needed to be a background to the outlining, so I drew that portion as if it was a quickly-painted backdrop, complete with spray paint scrawls at the edge.
How much open warp?
When Frida Hansen designed beautiful open warp portieres, or curtains, the areas of open warp she left between flowers or other images gave the resulting textiles a beautiful drape and a gorgeous changing effect throughout the day, depending on whether the light came from in front or behind. (See this post: “Frida Hansen Transparencies: What’s the Attraction?“) Some of the warp threads left unwoven can be quite long, but it is still a good idea to adjust your design to avoid really long warps. It gives the resulting fabric more integrity, and occasional super-long open warps may sag with a different tension from the woven areas. So designing for the open warp technique involves examining the image and adjusting areas of pattern to avoid the longest floats. That meant quite some fussing with the lettering, in some cases moving letters to overlap, or adding more of the blue background to break up the open areas. In the end, though, when a hanging is designed as an art piece that will remain relatively undisturbed on a wall, reducing the long unwoven parts is not so important as designing for a functional curtain, where you wouldn’t want to put your hand through the fabric while moving it aside.
The symbols below
Peace and power: peace signs and upraised fists were everywhere. People must have made their own stencils, or shared them. Sometimes the fists were tall, with the forearm showing; others were more squat in shape, emphasizing the hand. I added one of each to my design, plus a peace symbol.
I added a chain-like border, similar to one in a Frida Hansen piece (pictured here). Trying to break the chains of long-held racism seemed like an apt reference as well.
In this detail of the chain you can see one of my favorite things about the open warp technique–the shadows that appear behind the piece when it is hung just a bit away from the wall.
The pandemic design I did not weave
At the beginning of the coronavirus shutdown there were news stories about thousands of hogs being killed and disposed of because the packing plants were closed. I found it horrifying, the fact the meat was going to waste when people were losing their jobs and couldn’t afford groceries, and just the fact that so many animals were being killed. At the same time it was springtime, lambing season. When I saw my friend Laura Demuth’s portrait in doubleweave of herself holding a lamb, I thought about the pigs again. Some single animals are beloved, and then masses of others are destroyed. It’s disturbing.
I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting using Frida Hansen’s wool transparency technique. In this one I was going to weave both the pig and the background, and leave all of the black pig-outlines as unwoven. I think that would work well; I’ll try out the concept in a different piece.
I was close to finishing that cartoon at the time of George Floyd’s death by the Minnesota police, and suddenly it seemed weird. With all of the rest in peace references in relation to Floyd’s murder, a pig front and center would be strange. Would people think I am making a comment about killing a police officer? I kept the planned border as I moved on to a new design.
I still feel like weaving a pandemic response piece. Stay tuned.