Location: Savannah

Woven on a floor loom, the pine needles, collected from local woods are inserted individually into the taught warp and secured inside the weave by a line of weft. This weaving structure originated out of an attempt to represent hair being brushed in multiple directions — an ode to my late grandmother telling us that brushing our hair backwards would make us smart. Hair loss has been a theme for me personally, as I’ve developed scalp issues from psych medication and bouts of stress. Weaving needles into the cloth one by one became an active meditation on my own healing, in connection with my ancestry and the trees of Savannah, Georgia.

This incredibly slow manual process aims to spend time acknowledging the oneness between our skin and the land.

Georgia was once iconic for its tracts of long leaf pine forest, almost all of which has been logged and turpentined throughout early colonial and industrial American history. These weavings acknowledge and lament this history as well as current mistreatment of the land. It is silent protest against the destruction of Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest for Cop City. Through the act of planting needles in the weaving, I aim to build energetic reciprocity between myself and the forest.

My nostalgia for pine needles comes from sleeping in lean-tos filled with balsam fir every summer in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. The base of these three-walled shelters are traditionally filled with a “mattress” of dried needles and branches.

Also shown is a fox sedge weaving titled “One by One”. This piece is also woven on a floor loom with a cotton/linen warp and dried grass weft (no supplementary weft).