A textile investigation, entirely 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.
Process Documentation
Textile Creation & Art Direction by Ahnika Wood
Photography by Taniya Roberts
Modeled by Janae Nilo
by Ahnika Wood + Karina Rovira
"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
How do we filter [and grow new]?
What methods do you use to select what passes through?
Sketch translated into weave structure in Nedgraphics
Jacquard woven. Cotton + elastics
Jacquard woven. Cotton + elastics
a. An act or instant of involving or entangling, involvement.
b. The state of being involved.
see also: intricacy; complexity.
Inner eye multiply
3rd i = (sigma)(why)
ok? / maybe
up / down
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/ how are your insides processing today?
Designed in Nedgraphics, woven on AVL Dobby loom.
Cotton / wool / silk [+ active yarns].
AHNIKA WOOD, Photography Credit: Karina Rovira, Shaye Garrigan