MARKS AND SCARS
I have been collecting digital images of beauty marks, moles, wrinkles and aberrations of the internal and external body. Images are of my own body and the bodies of my friends and family. I weave these pieces by hand using a digital jacquard loom. I use the technical constraints of the Jacquard loom to abstract the source material. The personal becomes mapped out through the binary system of weaving. Through warp and weft, the problematic personal becomes an abstracted object. The weaves are structured by translating images of astronomical grids and scientific diagrams. The materials (party ribbon, industrial plastics, soft cottons and wools) become transformed through structure. A relationship develops between the microscopic and the macroscopic, the constructive and destructive. Like the loose and dangling threads, bodies come together and bodies fall apart. The same mark can be simultaneously beautiful (a beauty mark), ugly (a wart) and destructive (a malignant tumor). These marks tell stories, threaten health, and define identities. They are part of a whole, and yet can be exploded by their role in a person’s body: a scar that is a reminder of a violent past, or a cluster of interior cells that slowly takes over, a presence as hard to imagine as the far reaches of the universe.
Sayward Schoonmaker, artist and writer, on the Marks and Scars series:
It begins with looking. Initially we are read as bodies and then as personal details, individual topographies, the constellations and black holes of the cosmos. The complexity and monumentality of the cosmos are experienced only in mediated and abstracted forms, parts of the whole, the mole on the left shoulder, the wart on the hand, the scarred knee. This work explodes these forms, and (constrained by the tools used) addresses the limitations of defining experience. The ordering and mapping of these complexities begin with the jacquard loom, a tool based on zeros and ones, a binary system. The image emerges from the intersection of metallic and black threads, the intermingling of party favor fringe and the threatening lump. Threads hang from the perimeter in a halo mess, loosening from the grid and resisting order. From tool to material, the grand and the miniscule oscillate, asserting the woven structure’s object-hood, as map, as marker, as malignant beauty and benign ugly.