M Greenwald
For, of Them
Lost, fracture, remain
Inter
About
Rayon, cotton, wool, overshot handwoven textiles suspended from steel circle
The pieces in the series For, Of Them are each based on records of the financial costs associated with witch trials in early modern Europe. The information is embedded into the cloth by visualizing the square area of different line items; unwoven holes in the fabric are a visualization of different amounts of money made off each item of persecution.
The holes, the unwoven sections of the piece carry both the violence of the act and the possibility of escape. They raise possibilities between and within the concepts of tearing vs. mending vs. absence. The work is pliant, and roughly on a body scale. The unwoven sections force visual pauses, and act as redactions, omissions of what is stated plainly in the archive. They raise the question of what is gone and what is left. In the information recorded in it, the cloth is an archive, but the shape, scale, and orientation of the cloth is also a body and references how the corporeal is archived as well.
Can the removal of the information act as an offering, where I am digging against the mound of history to imagine a different past, and therefore a different future? Can the unwoven holes in the work become not silence but a mouth?
Lost, remain, fracture is a series of clay sculptures made by weaving pieces on a small floor loom, dipping them in clay slip, forming them as much as possible given the constraints of the material, and firing them so that the woven fibers burn out in the kiln. I’m drawn to bothclay and fibers as media that are situated in culture and history as functional and expressive objects that, in working with them, connect me to a lineage of makers. Both media to me also connote my body– in fibers, especially woven cloth, the material is pliable, soft, able to be a mimetic link to skin, while the structure of ceramics mirrors bones, even to the point where clay can be used to help with mending bone. The pieces are arranged in an altar– one that is like my body, like other bodies, and like the body of the land.
The inherent aliveness of the pieces is deeply significant in working with them. In the year plus since I started making the first experiments in what became the Lost, remain, fracture series, I have experimented with a myriad of ways to arrange the pieces. I have felt that in combining and recombining the pieces that they have spoken to me, whispering “no” or “yes” in how they live in a space. They are a tool for exploring Mel Chen’s living/dead animacy hierarchy, and a site for inviting in magic in the way they speak. The process of weaving is an inherently animist project of touching and being touched back.
These pieces exist for me as a portal of connection, drawing invisible lines between themselves and my body, radiating outward. In the final installation I arrange them in the living medium of soil, collected from the farm where I work, in an altar.
Inter is based on the material and poetic exploration of symbiotic colonies of bacteria and yeast (scoby), also known as a pellicle, that form while making a fermented tea, or kombucha. The jelly-like pellicle consists of a combination of cellulose, proteins, and the polymers formed through the growth of bacteria and yeast. I use these pellicles mostly unaltered, but drape them, still wet, over sycamore branches attached to the gallery wall. The scoby dehydrates, changes, and transforms over the course of the exhibition.
The dried SCOBYs function as my body at various levels. First, and most direct, the pale pinkish color of the pellicle is a mimetic approximation of my white bodied skin. Second, the cultures are all grown from the mother culture that I use to make Kombucha that I drink at home.
The microbiome that makes up the dried scobys, then, is related to my own microbiome, and is therefore related to me. Third, there is the inherent relationship built through the maintenance of a vat of Kombucha.
Fourth, there is the proximity to skin. In the accompanying video piece, New Body, I filmed myself drying a sheet of SCOBY across my chest and shoulders, gesturing at an attempt toward letting it become a new skin, or trying to grow new skin. The embodied exploration is directly related to gender and transition while at the same time the whiteness
that mediates it. As I explore learning what embodiment means as I am transitioning, I bump against the edges of what is possible. In experimenting with growing a new skin, I am playing with immediate transition, as well as modular, wearable, adjustable, removable. If the skin is not exactly mapped onto human gender, it can also relate to my interest in undermining hierarchies of being. At the same time, the pink squishy
pellicle foregrounds the whiteness of my skin, the way that gender is always racialized.