Portland TextileX Month 2022 | Leimei Lai | Kindra Crick | Charlie Wilcox
TextileX and the Portland TextileX Month Festival are part of a social enterprise founded and organized by Textile Hive to build community and foster cross-pollination among textile enthusiasts, artists, businesses, schools, and cultural organizations.
Limei Lai – Making Me Available to Me
Limei Lai fuses exhibition and workshop, inviting viewers in to channel their memories into embroidery “My inner conversation started from an identity research, Chinese American history, then Chinese female immigrant history and story, eventually shifting the focus back to myself and finding out that we are all ME.”
In Making Me Available to Me, Limei Lai channels a wealth of research and interviews into a book showcasing embroidery illustrations, each paired with poems. Audience members will be encouraged to peruse Lai’s volume before moving on to a guidebook that will lead them through an embroidery exercise. Encouraging a ‘complete conversation with themselves,’ Lai guides participants into a zone of memories and thoughtfulness, placing those thoughts into their own visual language that will find its way onto fabric.
“Life is a singular thing, yet there are many lives within. Between Chinese and American, between child and adult, between woman and girl, I regrow every day, reborn after each heart broken, reform through the learning and thinking. In this program, I am extending my process to the audience, a regeneration within a SELF.”
Kindra Crick – Embracing Connections
An immersive cerebral wilderness installation exploring the resilience of the mind Visitors will find themselves beneath an imagined landscape of the mind. Dendritic arms made of fabric-wrapped wire reach out to create an illuminated experience of neuroplasticity. Corseted around each neuron is netted fabric that shimmers in its embrace of memories held within each synaptic connection. Ink portraits of untangled, overlapping individual neurons painted on hand dyed kozo paper line the gallery walls for closer examination. The human mind with its 86 billion neurons is a resilient force for adaptation and regeneration through its ever-changing landscape of connections.
In magnifying and re-imagining these hidden molecular structures, multimedia artist Kindra Crick aims to evoke wonder and offer an imagined vision of the spectacular biological machinery which comprise the very core of our memories, sensations, thoughts and our essential sense of self. This immersive installation was originally initiated in 2015 during an art-science collaboration between Crick and neuroscientist Dr. John Harkness.
Charlie Wilcox – Muybridge Studies in Stop Motion Embroidery
Embroidered reincarnations and reinventions of the work of an early filmmaker. From 1878 through 1886, Eadweard Muybridge took hundreds of thousands of photographs of animals in motion. Stringing these images together sequentially, Muybridge developed a new way for us to see the world around us, breaking down motion into a series of figures able to be studied by the human eye. His work would prove influential for filmmaking and animation. In “Muybridge Studies for Stop-Motion Embroidery,” animator and embroiderist Charlie Wilcox brings viewers back to this primordial moment of seeing using the unconventional media of fabric and floss. In a world of constant visual exposure to both still and moving images, taking the time to recenter the eye on individual frames of movement culled from some of the earliest moments of documented motion brings newfound appreciation for our capabilities of documentation as well as a new way to think about embroidery as a practice.
