Handwoven book cloth by LMRM Chicago
by admin
In this edition of What’s on Your Loom, we feature a textile created for the special edition of HAMPI, River Coello’s award-winning poetry collection. Designed by LMRM and woven on the TC2, this project explores the expressive possibilities of handwoven cloth as both a surface and an object.
For the cover cloth, LMRM developed a gradient silk warp that reflects the thematic color palette of HAMPI. Our approach to the concept was to weave three covers side by side with the hummingbird motif and the tattered “background” positioned in different areas of the gradient so that no one cover is woven the same.
Leaning into the idea of change and movement, the movement of the weft yarn across the warp width of these three covers entangles each of the birds and their composition, but renders each of them in very different ways. With the nature of something handwoven, despite the threads being mapped via a digital file, we felt this process would speak to the special edition book cover as an object that is transmutable and varied each time it materializes.
Hampi Book Cloth…
Gradient silk warp designed and wound by Murat Ahmed.
Composition designed and woven by Hope Wang.
Woven on the 4-Wide TC2 loom, using double back beams for double weave.
Warp 1 using 60/2 silk, Warp 2 using 30/2, weft using 60/2 silk and 30/2.
Photo courtesy: Khalid Ibrahim
About…
LMRM is a project space fostering opportunities for art-making, research, and community programming around digital weaving. Based in Chicago, LMRM is currently one of few places in the world offering public access to a TC2 digital jacquard loom and the only one in the U.S. with an open studio model: no residency application, and no university enrollment. Through rental equipment, workshops, events, and collaborations, LMRM strives to emphasize weaving as a contemporary art practice.
LMRM co-directors Murat Ahmed and Hope Wang take on select collaborations with non-weaving artists in order to explore new woven experimentations that would expand the possibilities everyone’s mediums. Our collaborations with artists embody LMRM’s broader mission: to cultivate artist-driven inquiries that traverse disciplines and deepen appreciation for weaving as a vital contemporary art form.
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