Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

Weaving as creative deconstruction could easily sound like a rereading of Penelope waiting for Odysseus, unweaving by night what she wove in the day. But there is nothing being unwoven in my work. Rather it is a question of the work itself falling apart, being ripped apart at the seams, sagging under the weight of the many added histories that keep finding a way to be woven in.

My weavings are motivated by my ancestral and ongoing negotiations of approximate assimilation, synthetic identities, and the excesses that stride beyond categorizations. Chicanx, Punjabi, Hawaiian, Black, White: tensioned generations on display, warped and striped. Parading indigeneity in handspun wool winding through strands of polyurethane globalization.

But can these weavings bear the weight of the terms set before and embedded within them? It is only through the tension—strung up and stretched—that the woven body rises in chalked ropes and glittering sari silk.

While at Headlands

Headlands are spaces to find movement, a change in direction as borders or boundaries are encountered. In this sense, headlands are the eroded spaces between binaries—between two plots of land in the original Old English, between land and water, or between the city and the national park as the Headlands Center for the Arts is situated in today’s landscape. Weaving at Headlands then is a chance for me to collide with a new boundary, to find a new edge to the fabric, to erode a newly minted-MFA urban studio practice and trade broom handles for branches, nylon lace for lace lichen. Except, as a weaver, I could never settle for one material at the exclusion of the other. Rather, at Headlands I hope to weave into both the built environment and the wilderness, to discover what woven erosion looks like as objects, installations, and narrative action.