“Loud Volumes Soft Stuff”

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The exhibition titled, Loud Volumes Soft Stuff, by Sofia Hagström Møller and Marianne Fairbanks offers an explosion and interrogation of woven cloth. Through expanded structures, new materials and dimensional investigations Hagström and Fairbanks present works boldly activates the eye and more subtly focuses on the entanglements of woven cloth and their meanings, both personal and political. Traditional, digital and nonconventional weavings will be presented, colliding handweaving with digital technology and largely experimental forms. 

Hagstrom’s work employs Scandinavian weaving traditions and manipulates the cloth into forms through the use of modern materials and experimental techniques. Each piece delves into the historical origins of the woven structure finding personal connections in the patterns and bindings. She tells woven stories that play with colors, light and materials. Presenting weave design traditions in new ways, through the use of the latest technological developments, yet always with reference to the old analog hand-crafts. 

Marianne Fairbanks’s work explodes and makes bold the patterns and systems that are the basis of weaving, playing formally with perception, depth and volume. This body of work began with an investigation into historic American overshot weaving patterns found in books. After photographing and printing these patterns, Fairbanks then manipulates the pages by hand exploring the effects of physical interventions and dimensional shifts. The new images are then brought into the computer where they are further edited before being hand woven on the TC2 digital jacquard loom. There is an inherent complexity that lies at the heart of woven cloth and Fairbanks work to exploit this system to visually play with our understanding of dimension and volume.

The connection between these two artists is how their work both interrogates and advances weaving. Through scale, materials and bold palettes they create a new conversation about the textiles as sophisticated math and material way of knowing. Their overlap is how they both bring old traditions and into a new light. These artists approach the weaving with a playfulness of process that destabilizes conventional value systems of hard and soft form-making while digging into more philosophical and personal understandings of woven entanglements.

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