Last year, as the feverish swirl of life-changing events forced us to re-examine the way we work, share spaces and how we think about our individual and collective roles in our communal and national history, a group of us began to dream about a shared approach across disciplines within the world of textiles and gathered scientists and textile specialists to share their inspirations, ideas, work and their thinking about how one informs the other. At the core of our thinking was the collaborative path to building a place of healing looking towards science for meaningful partnership and a place of transformation.
We named it, aptly enough, Textiles x Science, and retroactively thought we might have been a bit more innovative but no less direct about it. Nonetheless, we went ahead and launched our affinity group, meaning that anyone remotely interested in understanding the function of textiles through the lens of science had a seat at the table. We think of the group as a material technology research platform focused on the fundamentally collaborative nature of craft, research, and invention. We aim to harness a collective of expertise across the arts and sciences through interdisciplinary research projects, mentorship, curatorial and technical collaborations, exhibitions, and outreach within the areas of applied sciences and technology, mathematics, engineering, architecture, in partnership with textiles and fiber-based media.
In our inaugural sessions, we had physicists in conversation with weavers and art historians+archeologists describing their experiences in recreating or simulating the gravitational collapse of dark matter into halos through 3-dimensional woven structures. We imagined the cosmos through the eyes and work of human geographers, sericulturists and weavers, Eduardo Portillo and Maria Davila, who make it their life’s work to study and narrate the changing energy of their landscape within the closed system of the universe. Gustavo da Silva made DNA sequencing familiar with the use of a simple yarn model and it made sense.
Textiles x Science has another goal, one just as important as the learning of the presence and agency of science in all manner of textile fabrication; art, apparel, architecture, ceremonial pieces, or medical devices. And this list is not exclusive. This other goal, aspirational in nature, is one of collaboration, of a sharing community. In our last session on April 3rd, an evolutionary biologist from the Field Museum of Chicago, Matt Nelson, compared symbiotic associations between different fungi to human collaborations noting that elements within ecosystems have organically connected to benefit not only their particular system but adjacent ones. He may not have known that he was describing what we are thinking for Textiles x Science; that we are seeking a mutually beneficial relationship between seemingly different disciplines that have deep roots in scientific principles and practices.
There is unity in knowledge that gives us permission to be curious, adventurous, even uncomfortable yielding newly found freedoms of expression within a practice, and Textile x Science intends to reside within that union of knowledge. The pivotal events of last year require us to expand our personal archives of knowledge and we hope that technologists, artists, and scientists will join us in exploring previously unidentified mutual exposures in textiles because it is in the blend of disciplines that the most innovative, pleasing and relevant work resides.
Textile x Science is organized by Maggie D’Aversa, Isaac Facio, Lindsay Olson, and Elizabeth Pope. For more information, please see the following links:
Textile x Science Facebook page
Textile x Science Instagram page
Maggie D’Aversa trained as a textile engineer and materials scientist and spent over three decades researching and developing textiles for industrial and medical uses with the majority of her time at Johnson & Johnson, Inc leading research teams in Asia, Europe and the United States. Over the years, she turned to studying social science, researching public health through the lens of the conditions of premature death for marginalized populations. Combine these distinct experiences in different countries and cultures and she finds herself back where she started; with her fascination with textiles using them now to illustrate observations of the social world through fiber.
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