For my final project, I want to create a database / archive website for the textile contributions collected throughout my studio practice, starting with those collected in “to you, 100 years into the future”, a workshop series and exhibition project inviting participants to actively reflect upon our existing belongings and revisit sewing as a time-honored practice towards emotional healing. Textile contributions were documented using embroidered ID numbers to be traceable pre-transformation (when it was collected) and post-transformation (after it was turned into a sculpture). The identification numbering system will serve as the base organization method for the website.
This archive shows the items that the workshop participants chose to “discard” into this project’s collective fabric stew and the goodbye letters they wrote to the “discarded” textiles. Together, the fabric stew of nostalgic colors and prints made from silk, polyester, cotton, denim, and others. Each discarded textile is given a new character to play—a bowl, a table, a monitor, a potted plant, a teacup—within this newly constructed home. Each household item transformed is called a “titem”, a play on the words “(t)ransformed item” and “totem”.
As we click through the archive, we’ll see different manifestations of the titem’s identity. It will display different modes of viewing; the front and back photo of the item, the goodbye letter written, the 3d object item, the 3d object titem, and the 3d objects’ uv unwrapping. In the same way that are contemporary bodies are now distributed, each textile is no longer just tied to its corporeal self, but the different representations and data that trails behind it. What would it look like if each textile that slips in and out of our lives was traced through the hands it went through, in harvesting the wool, spinning the thread, weaving the fabric, sewing the item, and onwards? Would it change the way we obtain, treasure, or trash each textile?
In creating the website, I’m heavily inspired by Laurel Schwulst’s work and her essay “my website is a shifting house”, where she writes a manifesto on what a website can be and what the web can look like if was built and guided by individuals rather than corporations. She writes on the capabilities of a website to be a living temporal space particularly effective for world-building, and consequently as a medium for artwork. Another resource is Aidan Quinlan’s course “Handmade Web”, which remains as an open access hub of information and references. In Quinlan’s words, “The hand has become increasingly less present in the web as we know it today. Websites are largely automated or built from templates, and the knowledge of how to make a website is relegated to a select few. It has only grown easier to learn how to make websites, but the perceived requirements and expectations for a website have become so convoluted and arcane that many avoid the subject.”