REGENERATION: SPLITTING HARMONIES
A textile investigation, handmade & repurposed from single use plastic.
In a world with more objects than materials, how can we look at objects as potential material for making? Regeneration is an outcome of such a question. Of noticing excess plastic packing materials in an office waste bin as inherently valuable. Of tending to its molding repeatedly by stretching to create thread. Of working with tender hands to change material made in a lab and extruded by a machine into a soft and airy net of safety.
The result reflects its making. An organically constructed, yet synthetic material that yearns to hold the body in its own contradiction.
Relationships to one another - relationships to our respective worlds - spin webs of rooms, architecture we live in and through. Our handiwork catalyzes into constellations of decay and bloom. You’ve come to fasten gleaming seaweed ribbons to my hair, trailing down my back - a line - forming a spine.
Textile & Art Direction by Ahnika Wood
Photography by Taniya Roberts
Modeled by Janae Nilo
Process Documentation
WE FOLD OPEN THE HOUSE: A narrative in poetryPrinted by the author at the
Independent Publishing Resource Center
318 SE Main St.
Portland, Oregon USA
February 2024
Inside pages are an assortment of papers including drafting, tracing, glassine, and tissue papers. The writing is laser printed and screen printed, with handwriting taking from journal entries. The back and front covers are made from repurposed materials and the binding is handstiched in waxed linen thread.
Copyright © Ahnika Wood, 2024. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written consent from the author, except in the case of quotations embodied in other writing.
Variable edition of 20
Originally, these writing were just for me - pages from journals when I needed to let something run out of me. It was a way to listen to and hold compassion for my overwhelming, fleeting emotive realities and place sights and sounds to my internal world. Over time, I started to see my writing as evidence of an underlying jounrey through safety, fear, loss, and creation. Though they were not planned out, they foretell and remember each other.
As a collection, they document my experience of patching together and releasing found kinship with those around me amidst collective turmoil - an experience of belonging throughout change. They are honest and temporal, describing a three year period through the portal of intimacy.
A series of 9 tensioned panels. Images shot on medium format film, flatbed printed on vinyl, and deteriated through ripping, sanding, and melting. Some images have additional analgoue maniplulation (burning, painting, and scratching) introduced to images after film development and before scanning for flatbed printing.
Created by Ahnika Wood and Karina Rovira in equal and joint authorship.
"I am too far to see you," -
- “you are too close to see me.''
Air can thicken between people and memory is translucent. So you walk through moments, with a vague tilting sensation. Vast motion is frozen on film and images melt into mirrors around you.
From all angles, there is an interest in proximity and tension between people. Does space connect us or cloud the vision of the other? We dramatically flip scale and distance. The space between the camera and subject is close - we attempt to see each other in brief abstraction. Resulting images become raw material for molding back to life the unseen aura. What feels false later is disintegrated through sanding, ripping and pulling. Fragility and strength are tools for forming nuance; tactile landscapes are coaxed from the surface. Refracted by constructs of dialogue and intimacy, we see and re-see the invisible string that connects us.
Up close, openings and overlaps dance. In the end the viewer is surrounded by floating suggestions, of flux and unease in implicit choreography.
- Ahnika Wood & Karina Rovira
