Last semester my classmate Lori & I were paired up for our second project in Collective Weaving. We had decided to do a submission entry to the Davis Projects For Peace. When this mass email was sent out my first semester at school, I thought to myself: a project for peace? What could that possibly consist of? How could art be related to something I feel is entirely political and/or religious?
I was in my first fibers class, Sustainable Forms, and had discovered weaving; if I loved weaving & the ease of hand weaving, then I deemed so would everybody else in the world…… I then had visions of children at The Rock in Jerusalem weaving a giant piece of cloth together, harmoniously.
Could the idea of warp & weft translate to a project for peace?
I shoved the idea into the back reaches of my mind, only to emerge when a couple of glasses of wine were consumed, but not really thinking much of it as to how to execute the idea.
Enter 2nd semester: ‘warp’ & ‘weft’ cannot subsist without each other to form something tangible, just like ‘community’ & ‘people’ cannot exist without each other….. do you see what I’m getting at? Karolina Gnatowski, my professor, saw it, and she helped orchestrate a classroom visit to a Chicago public school to help me realize my idea of children weaving, creating a community together with each other, symbolized by the fabric they each contributed to make, its existence not possible without each other.
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