Velvet is like the world was just born. Clean and new and so smooth.
Velvet is a sum of severed threads woven between two taut cloths. Threads tie the two cloths in tensile unity before they are cut, ruptured to produce two surfaces, velvet.
Difference, Along an Axis explores how categories of waste and value purport a cohesive topology, and asks how the motions of this system murmurate through material relations.
In a system which distributes objects according to economic value first and particular attributes second, knots between humans, non-humans and more than humans become obfuscated.
Yet severed threads hint at what was.
Parakeets, flocking together in cities where the transatlantic ships they travelled on once docked. Landscapes, a little too immaculate in an otherwise neglected area.
This process is embroidered into modern thought, where things oscillate between being candidates for meaning or subject to a pre-existing pattern. Agency over meaning is subsumed by a naturalised state of affairs which is unquestioned but only half the story.
An anisotropic surface changes as it rotates about its geometric normal
The work is the rupture that necessitates the creation of velvet.
Through a process traditionally used to make velvet, the work is presented mid-severance; one piece remaining on the double sided loom. The strands and fibres of each newly born surface unravel to create the delicate yet devouring texture of velvet.
Its genesis is a connective act. Its distribution severs these lies to create two twinned surfaces, each the other’s waste.
Its uncoupling creates a site of murmurations: fresh surfaces vulnerable to wind, touch, and breath.
Along the thread’s axis, difference begets potential. It moves from subject to candidate. This agency reverberates across the surface, to allow a topography which starts as another’s waste, yet through this status is given agency.
From rupture comes murmur. A violence necessitated by, and for, expression.
Acrylic yarn pile and acrylic weave mounted on oak frame
