A Line in Space

A version of this essay was delivered as an artist talk on August 1st, 2025 in conjunction with the show soft grids at Greensboro Project Space in Greensboro, NC.

In the studio, my process is very intuitive, and I don’t usually start out with a pre-determined idea that I’m trying to convey when I begin making. It follows that, as a general rule, I don’t want to tell you what the work is “about.” I’m a firm believer that if an idea can be put into words, we will just say it words, which is a much more economical way of communicating than taking the time to make a thing. I think that an artistic practice is less of a direct communication than a point of view, or a particular lens through which to see the world. I’ll start with the metaphor of a vantage point, and try to give you a lay of the land, a notion of where we are in a field of ideas and concepts surrounding this body of work - what I’ve been thinking about while I’m in the studio while I’m making. Then I’ll say a little bit about the work as a lens, and what perspectives it might be filtering through.


Lately I have become a bit obsessed with weaving. I’ve incorporated woven elements into the sculptures in this show, and the drawings all have at least an echo of a woven grid in them. What I’m obsessed with is not so much the craft of weaving itself and its particular techniques (though that is certainly a fascinating, bottomless rabbit hole of knowledge that I am gradually digging into.) What captivates me is the richness of metaphor in the concept and the history of the craft, and what it has to say about what it means to be human.  


As I’ve been making this work, I have been reading books on the subject of weaving, including Anni Albers’ classic On Weaving, and Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s archaeological field-defining tome, Prehistoric Textiles. As some may be aware, Elizabeth Wayland Barber is more widely known as the author of a book called Women’s Work, which explores women’s contribution to civilization and industry through textiles - which is an accessible, very interesting read. Prehistoric Textiles, on the other hand, is deeply, deeply nerdy - a true academic textbook that goes into excruciating detail about the particulars of every kind of tool and material related to weaving in prehistoric times, citing reams of previous research from hundreds of archaeological sites. And I love it. It has been sitting on the side table in my living room these past few months, and I pick it up while I’m drinking my coffee many mornings, and read just a bit. I enjoy it in large part because I love thinking about the experience of being a person in that time. I think about early people taking material in their hands, sitting with it and tinkering and solving problems - big problems, and quite elegantly. Today, most of the problems of survival are solved by products that we buy, but we originally solved the problems of survival every day, with our own hands. As human beings, we have always been thinking with our hands. And, it’s worth noting, as we did so, nearly as soon as we began making anything at all, we began making things beautiful. Bare survival has never been our goal.


Elizabeth Wayland Barber notes that what we term the stone age could just as easily be called the string age. It’s just that stone holds up a lot better, and is more obvious in the archaeological record. But through the truly extraordinarily careful, observant work of many archaeologists, we know that string, twisted cordage originally made of plant fibers, was one of the earliest technologies people discovered, earlier even than ceramics by thousands of years. We now know that neanderthals made string. So, around the same time as our ancestors were making cave paintings and stone tools, they also figured out how to twist fibers together to make cordage. 


Isn’t it something that one of the very first things we made, one of the first things we thought with our hands, was a line in three dimensional space? It makes sense doesn’t it? Think of all that follows from a line, in space. Once you have that twisting, tangly line, you have infinite possibilities of ways to turn it into something ordered, or use it to order other things. To bundle, tie together, loop into a net, to weave into a grid.  It’s no wonder that there is a prevalent linguistic link between the words for the fiber arts, particularly weaving, and the words for writing. Across multiple languages and completely different cultures, we find the words for weaving and writing coming from the same root words. The English words “text” and “textile” both come from the Latin texere, meaning to weave. A similar link is found in certain Mayan dialects, and some dialects on the other side of the globe in China. The process of weaving was such a fundamental reference point for the creating order and meaning out of raw material, that it’s what people thought of when they first began to write, and to describe writing. 


Anni Albers, in her Encyclopedia Britannica entry on the subject, defined weaving as the craft of interlacing threads rectangularly. Weaving may well be the very first instance of the rectilinear grid that sets apart human creations from the rest of nature, and has come to define a large portion of our technology and the built environment. It is even possible that the first rigid rectilinear structure constructed was not a wall or shelter of some sort as one might assume, but a loom, a structure made to hold threads under tension. I love the idea that all the rigid, gridded structures that are found everywhere in our civilizations arose from something soft, stretchable, pliable, that will snag, unravel, and decay over time. 


The first thing people often comment when they see my work is that “it must have taken forever.” And that’s true to a certain extent, these pieces all did take a good chunk of time. I don’t set out specifically to make pieces that are slow to produce, however. I have nothing to prove with endurance. A certain perspective on time is definitely a part of my practice though. A lot of people talk about how being in a state of flow makes them lose track of time, and it feels like time is going by faster. You may be surprised to learn that that doesn’t really happen for me - it never has. If anything, it’s just the opposite. When I’m in the zone in the studio, time seems to go by more slowly. To some, that might sound like torture with the kind of work I’m making, but I’ve learned to embrace it. It’s kind of like being in a dream, but the dream is the present. With my head bent over a drawing, or working on a sculpture, I am slowing down time, catching it with my pen, or in the thread. Time is so likely to get away from us now, in this relentless attention economy we’re living in. It’s not a bad thing to slow down, focus in, and make the moment feel longer.


The work has to do with an embrace of slowness, and it also celebrates incremental change. I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of emergence, which is when complexity arises out of many simple units interacting with one another based on simple rules. In the case of weaving, many repetitions of a simple pattern of overs and unders can create a wild array of different structures and visual effects. Add a little imperfection, a little randomness to the mix, and things get even more interesting. That’s why I may lay down guidelines on my drawings, but everything is freehand in the end. I’m interested in the ripples and patterns that emerge from a wavering freehand line. I usually don’t make a final choice of weave structure for my wood and woven fiber pieces until after the work is well underway. When I’m making, I’m thinking about provisional connections and temporary solutions. Each piece is an experiment. Compositionally, the work may be abstract, but I’m thinking about the specificity of the weight, the textures, the space, the tension, the interactions of the materials. I’m thinking about many branching possibilities, many different ways of organizing material, sometimes in systems overlapping or interlocking. Each line builds on the last, and each piece spins one out of another.


I’m attracted to this concept because every kind of improvement, and any resilience, whether it is in our personal lives, the culture at large, or even the biology of life itself, comes from this kind of imperfect iteration. The lone-genius, bolt of lightning revolutionary idea from the sky is a myth. Everything is the result of many previous and coexisting versions that each work well enough, every one an ad hoc solution to the problems of the moment. 


Circling back around to thinking about the concept and the history of weaving, the truly amazing thing is not that weaving and textiles simply serve as a useful metaphor for a lot of things in life (which they do), it’s more like the practice of interlacing threads seeped into the way that people think. The line in space turned into an organizing principle for information. Whenever we make something with our hands, we are doing more than producing the object. The tools and materials define the maker as much as the maker defines their materials and tools. The process of thought is highly embodied, though we often lose sight of that fact with all our screens and digital technologies. It can feel like thinking and information is abstracted and detached from the real world, but it is not.


From when I first started making art that felt like my own, I knew that engagement with material, with the physical world, was of paramount importance to me, and that has only felt more and more true over time. We are inundated with images and words with lightning efficiency, but I believe we tend to be starved of somatic information gathering that we are fundamentally wired for. We don’t do enough thinking with our hands. This is what motivates my work’s primary focus on process and material object-making. The process of making, thinking with my hands, helps me to remember that I am an embodied being, situated in deep time, and in a continual convergence with the world, and my hope is that the resulting work does at least a little of the same for its viewers.