from the artist:

I am not a scientist who has researched epigenetics, or a medical professional who treats the body, or a healer who connects energy. What I understand about epigenetics has been absorbed as an artist and a grand-daughter seeking to understand the story of my personal experience as it relates to sensations that feel bigger than me.

My maternal grandmother died on July 6, 1976 at the age of 59. Nine months and ten days later, I was born. I never knew her or my paternal grandmother who also died around the time of my birth. Learning more about my maternal grandmother’s secret experience in Russia is only one aspect of the disconnection I have felt from older generations of female elders.

As an adult, speaking about my grandmothers began triggering an emotional response, a tightening in my throat. An equally emotional and inverse response arises in me when I speak about weaving. I believe my experience of learning to weave in a community weaving center in Finland 25 years ago, where I was living as an 18 yr old exchange student, is the connection point between them.

That day, back in 1995, I sat at a small loom, in a large room filled with looms, weaving with Poppana. I was alone, but for two old Finnish women near me who had clearly planned to be there all day. They had large baskets full of used fabric (old sheets? curtains? clothes?) that had been pre-cut into strips and rolled into large balls, all different colors. They each sat at a loom weaving, talking too quickly in Finnish for me to grasp even small bits of their conversation. The music of their slightly whispering voices intertwined with the banging of the beaters on each of our woven pieces. They stopped mid-day to open their waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches and take a lunch break right there at the looms. I hadn't packed a lunch and pushed to finish my little table runner before my host-mother came back to fetch me.

Learning to weave in the land of my ancestors with two old women imprinted in my body a romantic sense of the female legacy I feel disconnected from, like a seed that’s germinated inside me for years, waiting for just the right time to break through the surface. Upon my return to the US, I studied weaving in college before shifting to study architecture, but I kept weaving. After September 11th, I stopped weaving altogether for 15 years in the name of being the serious, responsible adult I thought the world needed me to be.

The year I turned 40, I returned to weaving in the context of a deeper committed art practice that allowed me to express weaving in my own way. This sense of loosening freedom coincided with #metoo and the rising of women across the country. The potential for truly being heard allowed me to develop an intuitive relationship with my artwork that incorporates every experience and skill that I have acquired. At its foundation, my practice seeks to articulate the void of emotional connection to my female elders, while also becoming proof of the very wisdom that I seek.

When I first started learning about epigenetics, I was struck by the fact that my maternal grandmother carried me in her womb as an egg inside my fetus mother. A physical connection where there hadn’t been before. How might my emotional struggles be tied to something older than me? How might the stories we tell ourselves about who we are be rooted in history that we sometimes don’t even know?

I wanted to believe that I would find concrete answers to explain the complex emotions of fear, anxiety, and shame that I sometimes experience. This project has helped me loosen my mind’s connection to that way of thinking. A one to one correlation wasn’t necessary to infer a connection between her experience and my periodic fear of impending doom.

Through the process of working with my hands and paying attention, weaving emerged as a love language of physical motions that yield deeper conceptual & emotional understandings of the nuanced memory in my fibers.

Some of those fibers seek healing by going outward: speaking out loudly for justice, demanding acknowledgement of a system that lies to us and that suppresses stories not just of violence, brutality and corruption (that perpetuate still today) but also the stories of culture that don’t have a place in the narrative of the powerful. These fibers are fiery. These fibers are frustrated and want to burn away the veil of privilege and obliviousness that the systems encourage us to maintain.

Other fibers seek healing by going inward: speaking softly to my heart, repairing my own body, unweaving myself from the unconscious ways I have supported the system, and learning to truly embody another way. These fibers are naive from not flowing with the enormous currents of the river. These fibers are open, reaching, stretching, hoping.

Power comes from embracing the notion that we are extensions of an enormous tapestry, from actually knowing details of our own woven fabric, and understanding that our fluidity allows us to make alterations that extend in all directions.