Textile Talisman

Talisman Tower was made in partnership with Stanford Arts Institute and with the collaboration of a group of workshop participants: Quinn Dombrowski, Müge Gedik, Alex He Zhai, Crystal Huiyi Peng, Ruiyan Wang, Nick Harvey, Sarah Jade Yao, Athena Kolli, Nicole Chavez, Shuhan Liu, Fiona Wang, Paul Gontaard, Sandi Khine, Bhu Kongtaveelert, Jessi Pipert, Heidi Lubin. 

Special thanks to faculty and staff:  Hideo Mabuchi, Jessi Pipert, Heidi Lubin, and Terry Berlier.

Talisman Tower was made in conjunction with a recent research residency at Stanford University. I hosted a workshop and invited participants to collaborate on the design of the banner. Each figure in the weaving is that of one of the participants and represents their photo-response to the prompt to contribute to a social-support architecture. The participants were invited to join me in thinking about textiles as a social technology. We created informal talismans for one another as a way towards creating this collective textile-talisman. The banner is woven by hand on a digital Jacquard loom and embellished with beads and fabric dyes to add regenerative symbolic elements of collective sorrow (beaded tears/rain) and daily renewal (sunset/dusk).