&Now 2019 Conference

How do thinking, making, and materiality converge and disparage one another?  How is making art following a thread, literally and metaphorically?  These three writers and artists find in thread and threading a mesh of creativity and present their work and talk about it. Jeanne Heuving in “Making Mood Indigo” explores her compulsion in this prose and poetry piece to write of the material practice of constituting indigo dye from the indico plant and of dying cloth, although she had done neither.  She meditates about what it was in the writing of Mood Indigo that made her wish to blue her fingers and push dye into the weave of a cloth. Maria Damon “Textile: Text, Texture, Ur-text, Sub-Text” explores her weaving as “asemic writing” and her cross-stitch as visual poetry.  She thinks about how writers and scholars use of textile languages (weaving, knitting, spinning, sewing, quilting, among others) can obscure the historical / material relations between these two technologies.  As scholar, writer, and textile maker Damon considers the uses of these vocabularies in very different practices and how etymologies both blur the binary and heal the division between text and textile. Julie Patton in “Riffing Threads, Wires, Rays, Paths, Worlds, Whorls” presents her installation and word art.  She writes that art comes from the discarded, the hungry ghost of all that’s trying to emerge.  She does not search and then create, but rather sorts out and through the material of existence, stuff of daily life. There is the taking care of main tenance—dwelling—lineage and inheritance.