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Woven works by Tali Weinberg…

Woven works by Tali Weinberg...
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November 21, 2024
in Artists, What’s on Your Loom
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In this edition of the What’s on Your Loom series, we highlight the creations of artist and weaver Tali Weinberg. Selections of the featured works — Arterial Forest and Memories of Future Fires — are central to the solo exhibition of her woven works, Heartwood, currently on display at NYU’s Gallatin Gallery through November 26th. Below, Weinberg tells us more about these works, both woven on the TC2 loom…

Works…

Arterial Forest (2023-24)

The extraction and burning of fossil fuels cause eerily parallel harm to trees and humans. While extinction threatens one in six tree species in the continental U.S., one in six human deaths are directly traceable to pollution. Since trees clean the air and are vital to human health, these crises are inextricable. In response, this project is a tactile interweaving of corporeal and ecological bodies.

Each weaving in Arterial Forest depicts a tree from one of the more than 130 species increasingly threatened by human-caused ecological destruction. I photograph living examples of these trees, from which I create silhouettes to hand-weave on a digital jacquard loom. The woven trees are portrayed upside-down to resemble lungs, arteries, and roots—all parts of usually invisible, life-enabling circulatory systems. Woven partially from petrochemical-derived monofilament, the rematerialized trees embody connections between extraction, illness, species loss, and the buildup of plastics in our bodies and ecosystems.

Two other types of textiles inform scale and color, connecting these woven forms simultaneously to practices of grieving and care. Their size—closer to that of a human body than to a full-grown tree—recalls shrouds. Materially, they also share qualities with gauze, another white, semi-transparent cotton cloth used for wound care.

Arterial Forest was created with the support of a grant from the Puffin Foundation and a residency at Berea College.

Memories of Future Fires (2022) 

Forest fires; smoke inhalation; microplastics in our ecosystems, blood, and lungs; loss of homes past and future. I interweave petrochemical-derived materials, plant materials, and landscape imagery to draw connections between climate crisis, fossil fuel extraction, and the buildup of toxic plastics in the earth, water, and our bodies.

The hand-woven pieces in Memories of Future Fires each start with photos I took in a fire-scarred landscape in the Pacific Northwest. I reduce the trees in these landscapes down to their fundamental shapes before rematerializing them with petrochemical-derived monofilament.

As I look to connections between the life-sustaining circulatory systems that are both internal and external to the human body, the abstracted tree forms also begin to evoke hearts and lungs. This project was supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

About…

Tali Weinberg creates weaving, sculpture, and drawing in response to worsening climate crisis, tracing relationships between extraction and illness; personal and communal loss; and corporeal and ecological bodies. She combines plant-derived fibers and dyes, petrochemical-derived medical materials, climate data, and abstracted landscape imagery to explore the inextricability of ecological and human health. Weinberg’s work is in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Georgia Museum of Art, and the Denver Botanic Gardens. She has participated in exhibitions at the Griffith Art Museum (Australia), Zhejiang Art Museum (China), 21C Museum in Oklahoma City, Denver Botanic Gardens, University of Colorado Boulder Art Museum, Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education (PA), Center for Craft (NC), Dreamsong (MN), and Form & Concept (NM), among others. Her artwork has been featured in the New York Times, Colossal, National Resource Defense Council’s onEarth Magazine, Surface Design Journal, American Craft, Ecotone, The Journal of Data Visualization, and is included in the Fifth National Climate Assessment. Honors include an Illinois Artist Fellowship, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Serenbe Fellowship, Windgate Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, SciArt Bridge Residency for cross-disciplinary collaboration, a residency at New York’s Museum of Art and Design, and grants from the Puffin Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, and Oklahoma Arts Council. She has taught at California College of the Arts and Penland School of Craft and been a visiting critic at schools throughout the US. Weinberg received her MFA from California College of the Arts and an interdisciplinary MA (Textiles & Social Theory) and BA (Peace Studies) from New York University. She currently lives and works in Champaign-Urbana, IL.

Links…

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