Momentum

Momentum was made as part of my residency at Casa Regis, located in a region of Italy known for its textile production. A local neighbor and factory worker brought home a 25m piece of cloth and gave it to me. This cloth had reached the end of the line. It had been used to cover and protect the fine wool cloth during production, but after being subjected to high-temperature washings and pressure 50-100 times, and eventually exhausting its purpose, it had finally been retired.

I wanted to give the cloth a final use, taking something “ugly,” leftover, and used up, and making it beautiful, inviting, meditative. I wanted the work to speak of the cloth’s history and belonging in an iconic textile factory, to honour its past, gesture towards the labourers, to the repetition of their day, to the physical contact with the materials, the humans behind the machines.

Through the action of repetitive folding, scrunching up my own body into an uncomfortable position on the cold stone floor to create the folds, I condensed the cloth from its 25 metre length into a work that measures 5 metres in length. The cloth is altered in form through the simple action of folding, transformed through this labour of love into an inviting passage, a tactile surface, an undulating procession through space.