ARTIST STATEMENT
My recent body of work started with contemplating the geological history of the Catskill mountains and the Esopus creek valley and questioning the cyclical nature of relationships and interruptions to the land (both human and non-human) using weaving as a way to imagine timelines and process my thoughts. The work is meant to acknowledge the fact that there are things about my home area, about the mountains, rocks, water, anthropological history, that I will and can never know, and the tension that presents for me. The idea of embedding my intentions and ideas and feelings into a weaving pushed me to be more attentive to materiality, focusing on working with natural materials and self-produced materials when I can (such as spinning my own yarn). I feel the more I know and touch the material, the more of myself I embed in my work. I’ve been leaning more into the idea of honoring things, honoring the material and where it came from, honoring the things I know and the things I don’t know. In the past year the genocidal intentions of colonization have been intensely broadcasted and “revealed” through the screens on our phones; the pain, anger, and grief I feel (and could never feel in comparison) is inseparable from any work I’ve made since. I aim to put care into my work that sometimes cannot go anywhere else; care for myself, for the people I can and cannot reach, for the earth I walk on.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
I am multidisciplinary weaver based in the Catskills, NY where I was born and raised. With weaving at the center of my practice, I explore the rhythmic nature of the process, found in the movement of body, tools, and the sound of different parts of the loom moving, as a reflective space where the accumulation of weft grows into a catalog of thoughts that embeds itself into the weaving alongside image and pattern. Rhythm and repetition become contemplative, tender, and familiar; sometimes tedious which can be both positive and negative. This sense of rhythm has rooted itself, or is inherently rooted, in other mediums I work with as well, such as ceramics, painting, drawing, etc. My work often touches on memory, the self, home, imagined landscapes, history, geography, geology, and intuition. I have been a resident at the Icelandic Textile Center in Blönduós and was awarded a scholarship residency at Studio Aphorisma in Tuscany. I’ve worked as a teaching assistant for weaving and natural dye classes at Catskill Weaving School and have done a studio assistantship at Penland school of Craft. I hold a BFA in Textiles with a liberal arts concentration in History, Philosophy, and Social Sciences in Gender, Sexuality, and Race, from Rhode Island School of Design, 2023.
© Zenona Darrow