NinaJohnson

The works in this series began as drawings, visions of entwined bodies superimposed on the very basic structure of cloth: twist, warp and weft. Loose fibers bound together through a twisting motion form a line, a thread. As warp and weft, a grid, the line can be manipulated into a plane, a fabric, which as a garment can be given dimensionality and flow through time and space as an adjunct skin. 

The sculptures begin with flow, play, and joy in the studio. The drawings surprise me with their sensuality and with the challenge to make an impossible object–a body with no beginning or end, a body with no body, a poetic body. I must make the object seem like it was always already there, fully formed, inconceivable in its previous state–flat white cloth on a table or 3×1 twill on an industrial loom. I revel in the technical work and the poetry that seeps out of textile processes.

I was doing a lot of residencies at the time and realized that, apart from the larger trees, I saw the woods as an undifferntiated wall of green. I began to educate myself. I knew that dye processes could coax colors out of plants and so I set about developing a color palette in collaboration with the places where I was working. With a mobile “tinctorium” or dye studio in the back of my car, I began systematically studying identification, scientific nomenclature, chemistry, cultural uses and ecosystem relationships of plants I collected on foraging walks. This led to a series of wool sculptures named for the plants and techniques used in their production, as well as poetic, process-based workshops and installations. 

In 2022 I moved into a new studio and was able to increase the scale of my dye experiments. I have a wet room where I work with 30 gallon vats instead of stovetop dye pots that can only hold a few gallons. This makes it possible for me to dye yards of fabric instead of smaller swatches of wool. I am printing directly from plants onto yardage using a process that feels alchemical. In a series of steps, I coax molecular-level bonds between the cellulose fibers (cotton, linen), metals, salts, proteins and finally plant chemistry. A part of this process has been used to make ink since at least the 5th century, and is likely what Sappho used to write poetry on parchment or papyrus.

The other two pieces at Felix, “La noche está estrellada” and “Asses & Angels” are made from readymade vintage jeans. “Asses & Angels” clearly nods to the hanky code, a textile-based aesthetic signal by which the queer community historically communicated desires. This was done with colored bandanas stuffed into back pockets, and I admire the ingenuity of basing a secret code on this quotidian textile (my dad always had blue ones in his work uniform) that can be used to wipe sweat from the brow, protect your hair, blow your nose, get a date or tie your lover’s wrists together. I think a lot about the history of textiles. The bandana as we know it originated in India or the Middle East and got to the Americas through the colonial textile trade. The origin of the word means “to bind”, and the paisley pattern we associate with them originated as an ancient Babylonian fertility symbol. 

I was working with yardage of a very lightweight bandana cotton for this piece and wanted to make it flow out of the pockets and wrap around the asses in a way that defies logic. I have spent days in the Uffizi Galleries studying the progression of textile depiction in Medieval through Renaissance painting. The recent Siena show at the Met had a great section on this. The Silk Road innovations that reached Europe in that era–fine silks with gold thread woven in–expressed wealth and extravagance. The way the light bounces off of them in paintings shows the painter’s skill and the opulent, gravity-defying draping communicates the patron’s unimaginable wealth. I love it when there is so much fabric so extravagantly draped that it defies logic. There is no way that it could ever be flattened back into a plane. That’s what I was going for. 

The story with “Bog Skirt” is that I was looking for the oldest known depiction of a textile in another medium. I learned that very early “Venus” sculptures (30,000+ years old), those voluptuous stone carved female deities with huge tummies and breasts, are sometimes depicted with either a single twisted string around their waist or a string skirt. String skirts are fantastic early garments because they rely so heavily on the twist, which is the earliest structural innovation in textiles. To make a two-ply cord, the basis for all knitted and woven materials, first you twist the loose fibers in one direction to make a single fragile cord, then you hold two of those next to each other and twist them in the opposite direction, which greatly increases their tensile strength. Every additional doubling and twisting decreases the likelihood of the cord pulling apart. 

Some of these string skirts, which were sometimes so short as to be belts (they didn’t cover below the tummy in the very early sculptural depictions) survived into the 19th and 20th century because they were preserved in bogs or other tannic environments. Tannic acid occurs naturally in plants and is used in many textile dye processes. It is also a natural preservative, it sort of pickles certain kinds of fibers. One example of an early textile preserved in this way is the skirt worn by the Egtved Girl, who was buried in an oak coffin in Denmark 3000 years ago. The tannic acid in the log preserved her and her garments. I wanted to recreate one of these string skirts and play with scale. I found an archeological drawing and increased my copy by a factor of two. 

By increasing the scale, I was thinking about how each doubling of the ply increases the cord’s strength. I wanted to make the piece oversized and pendulous like the breasts on a Paleolithic Venus sculpture. I twisted my cordage using strips of old knitwear sourced from a local thrift store (they save bags of unsellable t-shirts for me). I pictured the vast mountains of discarded fast fashion textiles in the Atacama desert that will never decompose, our sad contemporary contribution to the archeological record. I soaked the cordage in a murky brown walnut bath, rich in tannins, before weaving the skirt. It’s finished with clay beads with a bronzed patina, after some Bronze Age pins and brooches in the Met’s collection. Finishing string skirts with bronze beads was fairly common and I can only imagine how the weight and jangle would have made them move and sound.