I primarily work solo in my studio, which I love, but I also enjoy collaborating with people and sharing creative space. The truth is I’m a complex human being and I’m not built to just work one way. I like to try new things. I like to add people to the conversation and see where it takes us. I’m always up for a creative adventure. 

This spring I had the chance to drop in on the process of Rachel Meginnes. We made a plan to collaborate on a new weaving project together—an experiment combining my drawing practice with her weaving practice. Instead of releasing a new series of prints this spring we’re releasing this new collaboration and the spark it has made for each of us. Read more about the process below.

All the details

To begin, I created a series of bold drawings in black and white to serve as the basis for the imagery. The only real restriction was not to draw too fine of a line because it would get lost in translation to the loom. I tried to keep it loose, and though our goal was to have one final piece I created eight drawings to give Rachel options to work with. Everyone loves options, and it makes the drawings less precious, which I think is important in an experiment. Rachel then chose a few that she thought would work well for this process.

Weaving in its most basic description is the process of making cloth by interlacing individual threads. It’s a grid of overs and unders and also of warp and weft. Warp being the threads that run vertically through the loom and weft being the threads that are shuttled back and forth horizontally.

Here’s where I think it gets really exciting. Instead of using thread for the weft Rachel has been weaving with cloth scraps. Much of her recent work incorporates vintage quilt tops which are cut into strips and woven as if they were thread. Knowing the process enthralls me in the sense that there is a telling and retelling of history, or rather a reexamination, a second look, a translation. Here is a link to Rachel’s instagram to see what I’m talking about.

The weaving process creates a distortion in the imagery because essentially you are compressing all that cloth tightly together. For this project we wanted to eliminate the distortion and to do that Rachel first had to create an elongated version of the drawing by stretching out the imagery (picture above). It sounds a bit counter intuitive but makes perfect sense in practice. Using fabric on hand Rachel pieced together a distorted cloth version of the drawings and then cut them into strips and wove them together to form the final non-distorted piece. 

After testing the process out we met up to talk about where things were at and what we were excited about. One of the things I love about working collaboratively is the trust that goes into it, not the trust where you know that someone is capable of doing the task, but the kind of trust where you know that the person you are working with uses their intuition without fear. Where they know to say FUCK IT and use the color that feels a bit daring or FUCK IT this might not work but I’m going to try it because I have to know what happens. I felt that way working with Rachel. It makes it more than a translation of drawing to weaving, instead of 1+1=2 it's 1+1=3 because there is a new energy created in that space between.