Orquidia Violeta is a Salvadoran-American textile artist. Growing up in a dirt-floored farmhouse in Central America, she remembers the embroidered pink dress her mother sent her from the US. Orquidia crossed the US border as a six-year-old refugee and went on to earn an Associate of the Arts degree from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. Exposure to labor exploitation in the garment industry led her to co-found LaborFruit — a prominent artist-cooperative storefront and gallery in Los Angeles specializing in clothing as artform. Living in Portland, Oregon, Orquidia continues to challenge herself as a textile artist, exploring new methods and mediums, such as machine and hand embroidery, knitting, weaving, appliqué, beadwork, fabric dyeing, soft sculpture, painting and drawing. For PTXM this year, Orquidia led Collaborative Poetic Weaving, a workshop inspired by Japanese Renga poetry and Surrealist Exquisite Corpse drawings, at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Portland. We recently had the pleasure of connecting with Orquidia to discuss her thoughts on New Traditions. Also, listen to Orquidia speak about her work and practice in an interview by Rachel Snack of the Material Culture podcast!   

What does New Traditions mean to you?

Traditions are ever evolving. You can modify or add to an old tradition, or create an entirely new one. Repetition and the passing of time are what give an action or behavior the significance of a tradition. In Los Angeles, I participated in an annual Día de Muertos art performance. Creating a performance piece for the show became a tradition for me and all the other participants, and in the years it didn’t take place, something was missing. With the pandemic, a lot of our old traditions have been disrupted. This is a great time to start a new tradition! 

What is a new tradition or practice that you’ve picked up recently? 

Weaving is an ancient practice that intersects many traditions. I am new to weaving, but I like to experiment, so as I was learning I started incorporating sentimental objects into the strands of my weaving. Now I always do this when I weave, so it’s a new tradition for me.

What is your first memory of making art with fibers?

When I was a student at FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising), I only had one sewing class! During that class I sewed a little dress with ruffles along the hem and sleeves. I didn’t really see my work as “Art” yet, that transition happened slowly over time. My path diverged from textile production toward art after I was exposed to the exploitation of labor in the textile industry. For me, creating the textile itself was a loving act intrinsically connected to the piece and the intended wearer. Thinking like this steered my fiber work into the art world.

What role do you think tradition plays in contemporary textile art?

Studying traditional work helps me to connect to and learn from textile artists from different times, places, and cultures. For example, I recently took a class in Zapotec traditional weaving. In their tradition they incorporate spiritual iconography, and this is something that I’m excited to develop more in my contemporary work. There is really an endless amount we can learn about ourselves and others by exploring traditions.

Through your workshops, what is your favorite tradition to share with others? 

After the regular traditional introductions, I like to have a quiet introspective mindful moment, where we give thanks to the space and clear room in our minds to create something new.

Please also, listen to Orquidia speak about her work and practice in an interview by Rachel Snack of the Material Culture podcast!   

Textiles by Sonja Dahl Photo by David Paul Bayles

Sonja Dahl is an artist, writer and lecturer of contemporary art at the University of Oregon. Her work critically explores the cultural, historic, metaphoric and embodied aspects of how textile processes such as indigo dyeing, whitework embroidery and patchwork quilting live within and reflect the values of human societies. She conducts her research and art making from a situated acknowledgment and critical engagement with her white, American, settler identity. She is a founding member of Craft Mystery Cult, a member of Ditch Projects artist-run space in Springfield, OR, and a continuing collaborator with Babaran Segaragunung Culture House in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her arts research projects and subsequent collaborations in Indonesia (2012 – ongoing) are supported by the Fulbright Foundation and the Asian Cultural Council. Sonja’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and her writing is published in peer-reviewed journals and printed and online arts publications. In conversation with former student and recent UO Fibers graduate Tuesday Lewman, Sonja discusses new traditions, responsibility as an educator, and lines of inquiry in her practice.

TL: I don’t know how much research you’ve done on this year’s festival, but the theme is New Traditions. I know you’re aware of that because your talk with Jovencio is kind of centered around that, but I’m just curious, what does that mean to you? What did you think of when you first heard that?

SD: When I think about what New Traditions means, one of the first words that pops in my head is adaptability. In my experience, I’ve observed that traditions are always a living and growing and changing thing. It’s tempting to think of tradition as something static or something that stays the same across time, whether it’s across generations or just a shorter thing that’s shared or done. But it’s my observation that traditions are constantly adapting and changing to the world around us. To be part of a tradition is often to be rooted in something or to be dedicated to something that’s shared. This idea of a new tradition feels to me like it implies that adaptability. It also feels loaded with a kind of idealism or hope for positive change.

It’s a complicated thing, because I think many people use the word tradition in a very loose way. I don’t know if everyone really understands what a tradition is or what it means to them. Part of what’s exciting about that is that traditions are ever changing and adaptable. The idea of a new tradition brings up all these interesting questions for me about how do you make a new tradition? Can you make tradition from scratch? What does that look like? What does that mean? What does that entail today? And that brings up another point, that traditions are often located somewhere or with someone specific. They’re often context specific. That’s part of what creates that kind of rootedness or that lineage that a lot of people desire. A new tradition has to build on that and have some kind of anchor. It’s interesting to think about, what are those anchors for people?

TL: Definitely. What are some anchors that you build off of in your practice? I know you work with indigo and quilting and weaving which are obviously very traditional kinds of crafts in a lot of people’s eyes.

SD: That’s a good question, I feel like my work is often in conversation with and making use of these kinds of traditional materials and techniques, working with indigo dye, patchwork quilting, and whitework embroidery, that’s been another line of inquiry for me. I’ve also been working with Pendleton woolen fabrics and thinking about settler culture in the West. I don’t necessarily see myself as being specifically rooted in any of those kinds of traditional media but I’m really interested in what kind of ideas and stories are embedded in material culture and specific materials and our broader relationships to them. That’s part of why I always gravitate towards these kinds of materials that are recognizable…or maybe not recognizable, but there’s something potentially accessible about them. I think about that especially with quilting. I don’t necessarily make quilts, I make quilt-like objects, so I’m often making use of these materials and media that have deep roots for a lot of people. I know lots of amazing contemporary fiber artists who work in the media of quilts, who are from a lineage of quilters and actually learned from family members who learned from other family members. That’s being embedded in a lineage. I feel like I’m constantly quoting from and making use of these materials and in a way trying to tell other stories, or think about specific aspects of what it is to be part of a culture and be part of society, which is implied in the phrase, ‘the fabric of society,’ which I’m really fascinated by. That said, I think I share with a lot of contemporary makers a really deep desire for some kind of lineage, connectivity. I’m really curious about that and critical about it. Especially with my early material love of indigo, that began just from complete material fascination. As with so many people, when you see that cloth turned blue in the air for the first time, it’s just…

TL: Magic!

SD: …You lose yourself. I’m not the only one who took a community college class on natural dyes that changed the course of their life, you know. But as I continued to work with indigo over the years, more and more questions came up for me and a lot had to do with the sort of cultural specificity and sense of not belonging. And so in part that was what kind of drew me to the time that I spent in Indonesia, which was asking a lot of these questions of ‘if I’m going to work with a material that’s not of my own culture, that doesn’t technically belong to me in that very direct way, I need to invest myself more deeply in building more of a relationship and deeper understanding and respect for at least one place that makes use of it.’ Coming back from that really shifted my focus and use of Indigo to think more specifically about indigo’s relationship to the United States, to our history. That shifted my research into looking at indigo’s history as a plantation crop, its relationship to the transatlantic slave trade, and all these more complicated aspects of American history that are continuing to play out on the contemporary stage in our society.

In many ways, these traditional materials kind of guide me and I follow them. The materials are teaching me things, they’re taking me places that I need to go in my work and deepening my critical understanding and ideas the longer that I’m in relationship with them. There’s a lot more I could say about that, but I’d say I make use of these kinds of traditional media as a way of trying to connect materiality and ideas and lived experience, the relationship between being a person and being a part of culture or society. My work with indigo raised a lot of complicated and interesting questions for me about what I have a sort of claim or relationship to, just naturally, as a descendant of immigrants who all assimilated and left their home cultures behind in so many different ways. I share with a lot of Americans this lack of roots. They’re there, but they’re sort of truncated. That sort of shifted me in the direction of thinking about and making use of materials that have some kind of relationship to the places of my ancestry, Norway and Holland and Northern Europe. That’s part of what led me to whitework embroidery, which is also a fascinating material to use when you’re thinking about whitenes or European settler culture. Same thing with patchwork quilts. I’ve been doing research about women who quilted on the wagon train trails, the relationship between the pioneering West and these kinds of hand making traditions and various things like that. That’s been an interesting trajectory as well in my work, the materials and the ideas and the necessities sort of work in tandem.

TL: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that a lot too, specifically with weaving for me. On the one hand, it’s exciting to discover a new material or technique and feel like because you don’t have a direct lineage to it, there are no set rules to follow. Or rather, it doesn’t matter what the rules are because you can just play by your own. At the same time, I think there’s definitely a responsibility to understand and respect the history and learn why this material has the value that it does in certain contexts. And that understanding has a huge value. Very interesting.

SD: Yeah, complicated.

TL: Very complicated.

SD: Yeah, that word responsibility, I think is a really important one. That’s one of the big words in my vocabulary, in my making practice, in my research, and my role as an educator. I’m always thinking about ‘what is my responsibility? What is a responsible way to approach this topic or material?’ I think responsibility and respect go hand in hand.

TL: Definitely.

SD: It’s an interesting and urgent question to be asking, because there is a feeling that in this kind of globalized situation that we all exist in, anything is possible, everything’s up for grabs. But yeah… you’re right. That comes with hidden costs. Asking those questions is super important.

TL: How does being an educator affect your view of traditions? You’re constantly around students and emerging artists who are discovering and engaging with a lot of traditional techniques for the first time. I’m just thinking of myself, discovering weaving and feeling like, ‘Oh, my God, I just discovered electricity!’ How does that shape your view of traditions in textiles in particular?

SD: That’s a wonderful question. I think there’s a really interesting mix of joy in sharing those discoveries, and a sort of gravity in the responsibility. I think a lot about how we who have had academic art education are trained to think and approach things and the emphasis on having the ability to talk about or express linguistically the meaning and the reasons behind one’s work. There are all these things that go into guiding students, as an educator. Part of the responsibility is in trying to create a space that is as open and inviting for exploration as possible. I have a lecture every term in my Understanding Contemporary Art class that deals with appropriation and representation. So it’s kind of looking at those things, both as how they’re tools for artists, but also how they’re sometimes dangerous terrain. Students always have a lot of questions about that, they want to talk about it more. There is definitely a sense across contemporary culture that young people are very tapped into, obviously, that the taking of something that doesn’t belong to you for your own personal benefit is bad. And I think sometimes that fear of appropriating stops students. I think those are moments that are really rich and tenuous and full of possibility in an educator/student, mentor/mentee kind of relationship. Those are moments where there is a lot of room for conversation and a lot of room for growth and exploration.

I am constantly shifting my mentality around these kinds of things, you know, ‘how do you guide students responsibly in learning a tradition that’s new to them?’ That’s the other thing about new traditions… It’s not just that we’re building traditions in a new way or creating new traditions themselves, but that a tradition can be very new to someone who has just discovered it. There’s so much excitement and possibility in that. When someone discovers indigo dyeing and is just blown away, or discovers weaving and is blown away, there’s this incredibly potent moment of possibility for helping guide that early understanding and material love. There’s lots of really useful questions to ask. It’s also tricky. I don’t want any student to feel shut down, but at the same time, I want to encourage careful and critical thinking about materials, about relationships between people and their materials and techniques and history. Indigo is magical, but what is our responsibility to a material that has specific relationships to the past in American society? What was my responsibility as a foreigner in Indonesia studying about indigo dye? It’s not my own tradition, but it’s a material that I am familiar with and love and use. As an educator, it’s exciting to be in a position helping to guide students through some of those early formative moments in their making processes.

TL: That’s a big responsibility to be shaping the way that a group of young people and emerging artists are engaging with these ways of making. I’m glad that responsibility is something that we are both kind of thinking about in this conversation. I’m curious, what is a new tradition that you have taken up in your practice recently? Is there anything that comes to mind for you?

SD: I’m constantly trying new things in my making practice and like I said, the materials often lead me to the places I need to go conceptually, and sometimes the ideas lead me to specific materials. Most recently I have been working on the TC2 digital jacquard loom and as you know, it’s part of my role in the fibers area at UO to caretake this technology and that has been my primary role with it. Finally, I’ve begun really exploring it for my own work. In many ways, doing that in the specific site of UO’s fiber studios is really interesting because we also have the manual punch card jacquard loom that Barbara Setsu Pickett brought to the department. She began the tradition of the student trips to the Lisio Foundation in Florence so that students could learn how to weave in silk on these very old punch card looms, and we also have all our floor looms and tapestry looms and the digital jacquard loom, which is the most contemporary descendant of the punch card loom. So to weave on that loom, in that specific context, there is already a sort of a layering of relationships of lineage that I find really interesting. Not even to mention that this is one of the newest forms of weaving technology, which could be thought of as a new tradition in the broad and global history of weaving. This digital jacquard loom occupies a very contemporary place in that and stirs up a lot of controversy among handweavers.

TL: Oh, really?

SD: Yeah, I think with any discipline where people are deeply invested in a skill there’s always opinions. There is this depth of investment and care about feeling that one is a caretaker of a lineage. I think that’s really powerful and deeply important and not as commonly encouraged necessarily in contemporary art education. There’s something very freeing and exciting about interdisciplinarity but there is also something deeply rewarding and important to be learned from a long term relationship with a medium you know.

TL: I’m interested in the TC2 naysayers. I guess I can understand how the process being so different and new could make handweavers bitter but it’s interesting because I feel like sometimes a new technology or tradition developing can be a way of showing respect. Like, we love weaving so much that we want to create a new way to enjoy it and engage with it. It’s interesting to me that there are people out there who are opposed to it. I guess I just hadn’t thought of that.

SD: Well, I think that’s based on an understandable reality. Sometimes new technologies mean loss. Sometimes it means change, like, traditions can shift in ways that are really adaptable and positive and resourceful, but traditions often are forced to adapt in ways that involve loss. Do you know the term Luddite? That term actually comes from when these manual jacquard punch card looms were first introduced. That was a whole new technology that didn’t quite automate weaving but made it possible for really intricate weaving to be done on a larger scale. There were handweavers whose trades and livelihoods were threatened by that, so they actually went around smashing these looms. The Luddites were literally loom smashers. When I learned that I was like, well…I guess I have to stop using that term to describe my apprehensions with technology because I don’t think I’m gonna go around smashing looms. I think that’s an interesting thing to mark, that with new technologies in any kind of material lineage, that can hold both great possibility but also the potential for loss and for a major shift. The loom smashers are one example of that.

Living in Indonesia, I saw that kind of adaptability constantly. There were a lot of artists, dyers, and artisans who were working really hard to try and re-learn some of the ancient knowledge around natural dyes, including indigo dye where there had been a multiple-generations break in that knowledge, in many cases completely lost. How do you relearn a tradition that already existed that you should ostensibly be able to have access to but the knowledge is gone, and the reason that knowledge is gone is because of colonial intervention? In this case it was the Dutch colonial enterprise in Indonesia. For hundreds of years they introduced synthetic dyes in an effort to sort of streamline and modernize textile manufacturing. Sometimes when we get caught up with the cool new thing and let other things go, down the line our descendants end up asking ‘where did that skill go?’ and ‘I want to know how to do that.’ The loom smashers and the natural dyers and all these folks who are lamenting losses in a sort of chain of knowledge…that’s also really fertile terrain to recreate or make a tradition new again. What grows in those spaces I think is really interesting.

Stephanie Sun: I’m excited to talk with you about your practice and how you think about new traditions!

Sarah Brahim: I’ve been fascinated with the idea of new traditions for a while now. I’m thinking about what it took to make the traditions that are already established and considered ‘traditional’? In a time when people weren’t communicating through global media or social media, how did this information get spread across? How did it get shared and what was the time that accumulated for this thing to now be considered ‘traditional’?
There comes a point in time when you reference something as ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’. You’re really referencing a point in time and a departure from something that came before. A tradition’s occurrence and all of the elements that made it what it is made sense in a specific time. And that’s part of what makes it a tradition, that you go back to it. So many things we’re doing now are under the umbrella of ‘contemporary’, but what does it take to start a tradition that would be long lasting?
I think traditional things are not just in craft or art, but in food or rituals, like celebrations or holidays or greetings. I’m curious how to move forward and establish new traditions. What does that take? What does that mean?

SS: It’s interesting to hear you talk about traditions in this way, it brings to mind this idea of evolution. As we evolve, there are certain behaviors that we learn which help us survive, so those are what we hold on to and what we carry forward in order to continue to be surviving and thriving. Maybe traditions were these actions, these community responses that, because they favored different values and were needed in different ways and kept coming back up, that’s why we have them now.

SB: Yeah, I think so. It does seem a bit difficult to start new ones and for them to really take hold, so this is something I’m interested in. If there are new ones that take hold, how are they different and are they really different or was there just a moment where there’s an erasure of knowledge and you’re actually just filling the previous traditional role, just in a slightly different way.

SS: That brings me to this question of how you think about traditions in your own creative process and in your work. I’m curious to hear if there are craft traditions or cultural traditions that weave throughout your work and collaborations.

SB: The first thing that comes to my mind is honor and honoring. In the way I was raised and the community I was around, I was always taught to honor the people that came before you, the people that developed the learning, and to specifically reference, credit and honor the person who taught you. That is really important when it comes to talking about practice and teaching and new traditions.
Obviously, everything is building on each other and inspired by what came before us, so we can only make what we can because of what happened before. So I think it’s important to be considerate of that. For me, my mother was a huge teacher and also a facilitator of seeking people out to teach me things.
When it comes to my practice, I’ve been wandering through a few different things.
The first is something I was experiencing. I was processing the grief of my mother for many years, and certain projects in my work since that happened are about that pain in the body and about grief, about creating work that can resonate with other people who are experiencing this. Art and music and dance are really what got me through this time. Especially other people’s reflections on the subject, it made me feel there’s other people exploring this, there are other answers – I wasn’t just wandering by myself.
I had to create works that were my own symbolic gestures of grief to explain to myself, what is this feeling? The series I made of cyanotype are all gestures of my hands, which was nine months of research exploring how grief is imprinted inside our body and how we experience it, and then how is the weight of that reflected in our hands. This was also inspired by the theory of epigenetics, which states that biologically you inherit three generations back, at least, of not only physical trauma, but also psychological trauma. So because you were an egg inside your mother’s body, which was held inside your grandmother’s body, you all shared the same body at one point, and the same breath for those nine months. It has been proven that that imparts her burdens and her trauma onto you. As we walk forward in this life, obviously we have issues and hang ups and some of those are because of the way we walk through life and what’s happening to us in our environment, but who we are is a little bit already formed from this theory of biological inheritance. These things are the root and the connection of healing.
To go back to the question of how traditions exist in my practice, I find it really important to know the source of things in order to use it in a context that’s meaningful now. I think it’s amazing to break rules and to feel free, but for me, I’m always very, very aware that nothing I’m doing, no tool I’m using is coming just from me. For me, a lot of the information I get is informed by where something came from.
When I started doing textiles and throughout last year when I was practicing cyanotype and also natural dyeing, I started to learn the histories of so many things like materials, the history of cotton, for example, and then the history of each color, how we got it, where it came from, when chemical colors became replicated…This all brought so much meaning and historical context into the work. Sometimes if you don’t know where things are coming from, you could be offending in a way that you don’t mean to, so it’s just good to know.
I get inspiration from these materials. For example, plants and the colors that they produce, whether they’re indigenous or were brought to a certain land, always mirror the social history at the time. It’s always, for the most part, people who brought plants to a place.
I just think that this is important moving forward in the time we’re in. Contemporary artists, we can create whatever we want from this point, but being considerate of other people in the world and where there are points of tension or struggle, being able to know and reference if your work is involved in that in any way is really important.
Even just the simplest thing, everything we wear every day and the fiber I work with – cotton – has a very tumultuous history in both India and West Africa and Mali. They were like the main place of the whole world, growing fifty or more heirloom varieties of cotton. They were colonized and it got taken away and they were left with just one or two. This adds a preciousness for me, a value, it’s not just something I take for granted. I realize where the abundance really came from and what was lost and the care that should be considered in this.

SS: You speak to this idea of making the effort and taking the responsibility of learning what you can about what you’re working with in order to fully appreciate and fully recognize the history and the weight of those materials and those practices. It sounds like it imbues your practice with this weight of time…the way in which you’re thinking about these materials, where they came from, how they were used in the past, and all of the history that’s carried along with that. It feels like there’s very strong respect and consideration of the past and how what you’re doing with the materials and the practices moves that forward.
SB: It feels more meaningful for me to connect to what came before, because it adds a lot of meaning and purpose and also informs me of my situation, where I’m coming from, and where I’m consciously meeting this thing that I’m working with. I’m very open to learning, I want to be informed by genuine sources
A major theme of my practice is connection and I’m constantly baffled by these precious moments when I’m presented with someone who is a master at something and explains it to me. It opens a whole door to the purpose and the meaning that a specific culture uses and works with something.
With the industrial revolution, capitalism and modern society are a main driver of that quest to create a disconnect between us and our environment and the past cultures that have meaning for these things – because if you don’t care where your t-shirt comes from, then you don’t care that the water in chemical dye polluted the land and so on and so forth. If you’re not connected, then it creates blinders.
An example from last year when I was studying natural dyeing, I just looked at my closet and unknowingly so many of my clothes were dyed in chemicals. I didn’t even know that there was another option. I didn’t know that all things were naturally dyed until 1850. This was a breakthrough. It created pathways of understanding for me. We already have the tools to continue this practice, certain places in the world never stopped doing natural dyes. It brought a huge awareness to my life and my practice. If I’m going to do something, I want to do it right and there is a lot of knowledge out there for doing that. It just might be a little harder to find, you might not even know what to look for.

SS: Your practice is about creating this connection, this relationship between the idea of what has been traditional and new traditions; it requires not only honoring and respecting and recognizing what has come before you, but also this openness to realizing when something that you might have been holding on to unknowingly is no longer working for you and is not something that aligns with how you want to be moving forward. Then there’s this almost backtracking to learn what came before in that area where you were previously unaware and then to start bringing those traditions back from the past and incorporating them in a new way into your life. I wonder how your creative practice has changed or transformed particularly during this past year, a time of global and social upheaval during the pandemic.
SB: It was a really difficult year, it made me question everything and brought to light a lot of realities. In our lifetime, we haven’t experienced something completely global, something where every single place in the world has a similar problem that we all have to solve and get through. I feel like a lot of people are now a little more connected than they were before, maybe. We had to rely on each other and community and relationships.
It highly deepened my practice. I was stuck in the house alone for the first year. I turned to my textiles practice and created the cyanotype body of work. Not for anything, not to show, I needed to do it, I needed to follow through. In retrospect, I’m glad that I did it. It didn’t feel good at the time, but for me, art is really vital and necessary to my life, my happiness and satisfaction; it fulfills a curiosity.
At first when we were all unsure what was going on, it was just so horrific and stressful, I really had to question, what am I doing? Why is it important? This doesn’t feel relevant or like a contribution, but it was good to question and commit in a new way. I really learned through my practice and through conversations in the last year, that it’s really vital – we all needed to see a connection. We needed to see beauty. And a lot of that came through books, movies, music, visual arts, dancing. People have turned to those things, you know, to get through, and so I feel like this is how that impacted me. It was really like a restart button and a deeper commitment. I’m very sure that this is an important thing.
Being in the arts my whole life brought me the people who were in my life and the people who are carrying me through to the next phase of life, and that connection is very important. Even if it’s not about the work itself, it’s about your community and what brought you together.
I’d been tinkering for so long with natural dyes, then I finally just started doing it in the kitchen and learning from this amazing place called Botanical Colors. Tuning into that really became my structure and stability. Through their resources, I kind of just started experimenting with plants in the garden. Then I realized I needed to be gardening which led me to realize I needed to be farming. So I volunteered and started working on a farm. This created a new life for me, a new way forward and a sense of connection. By the end of the year, I started a small natural dyeing business and I was able to generate a little bit of income to get by. I felt like I wasn’t creating more damage to the Earth.
Art and my practice have really carried me through last year. Last year planted so many seeds for me that now I’m able to watch grow and dive deeper with a fuller energy than I was capable of before.

SS: Thank you for sharing that. It’s exciting to hear you talk about how your practice has shifted and it sounds like it was a fulfilling pivot. The way that you embraced it and moved forward, to be making art for yourself to get through this time, to have that cathartic experience, to have that community.

SB: Dyeing stuff takes all day. I had like four pots on the stove at all times. And, you know, I’d have bad days where I was losing my sense of time and then I’d be like, ‘you just have to wake up. It’ll be really exciting if you just try these two colors. You didn’t try this before.’ I tried to convince myself.
There are three stages to dyeing: you have to clean the material and then you have to set it for the color and those two are both clear treatments. They take a lot of time and there’s no change in material. Then you dye and can do a treatment to modify the color. So I would just start cleaning and then do the next part and then do the color pots. So it was like the end of the night, eleven o’clock at night in my kitchen…I love the first dip in the dye pot – you’ve done all the work to prepare it and then you just dip it a little bit and pull it back out and you get to see the color that it’s going to impart. This is so exciting to me every time, because depending on how you brew the color it can have completely different results. I was so grateful for a long process that consumed my day.
To give those things away to, to connect to someone and deliver it to their house, I felt like I was doing something, completing some small circle. I’m just grateful to the process and the knowledge that I came across to get me through last year.

SS: We’ve all had to find these different ways of getting through this time and to hear about your creative process, but also your mental process and how you were thinking about it is really inspiring.
We’ve kind of touched on this a little already, but are there other traditions that you are influenced by or you intentionally draw from for your work? Specific dyeing traditions that you’ve found really impactful?
SB: There’s so many and there’s so much to learn. I recently ordered this book on traditional Saudi clothing, book title (not referenced specifically in interview but would love to include name). It’s the most beautiful book. It’s done through geographical location and also by tribe. It’s really amazing because I get to wear my own culture and clothing and traditions for the first time. There’s been quite a disconnect between present day and the knowledge and practice of how they’re made and wearing them. There’s this book called ‘Tana Bana: The Woven Soul of Pakistan,’ which has also been very inspiring for me. Each stitch is a communication of the language.
The greatest inspiration I found was last year I took a Malian mud-dyeing class with an indigo master and French Malian artist called Aboubaker Fofana. He talked about the traditions of indigo in Mali and it’s so deep and so beautiful. Most dye plants are also medicinal, and he grew up Mali with his grandmother, a naturopathic doctor. She would ask him to go out and gather the indigo leaves and he discovered for the first time when he was picking them that they oxidized on his hand, turning the color blue.
He taught us that as a master of indigo, it’s traditional to master these 12 shades. It goes from the lightest color, which is very hard to achieve – it looks like something between the lightest blue you can imagine and white, it’s called the ‘blue of nothingness’ – and then the darkest color is very hard to see and very hard to achieve. It’s something between a very dark blue and black and it’s called ‘profound night sky.’ The masters of Indigo are able to have a client come up to them and point up to the sky at any point in time, and they can achieve that color with the indigo dye.
These are very peripheral things about Indigo and the practice, but just shows how much meaning is in this scale of color. When a baby’s born, they wrap them in indigo, and when somebody passes away, they wrap them in indigo. It was one of the main places in the world where they grew, farmed, and cultivated indigo. Because of its natural properties, it also served as a UV blocker of the sun. Aboubaker was talking about the meaning of a garment or clothes in general, serving as a protection, as our armor and second skin.
Studying with him and hearing his stories had a huge impact on how I see things, the history I feel I need to know about things. It created a special connection for me; for example, I don’t have to wear a t-shirt, because it looks good outside my body, but I could dye my clothes with a fig tree from my yard that my dad planted. Then I’m able to carry more connection and meaning into what I’m doing. And that made a lot of sense to me, even though that doesn’t really exist in a culture I’m involved in. I think you can impart meaning in a very personal way through inspiration through these practices.

SS: The note that you ended on reframes the way that I think many of us have been raised to perceive T-shirts, to perceive clothing as always having to do with the latest fashion trend and however it fits your body, et cetera. And I love the idea that by literally embedding your own meaning, your own history and stories into this piece of clothing, it can become so much more for you and step outside what is often a very toxic narrative surrounding women’s bodies and the fashion industry. It feels like that’s a way to step forward and to return to these traditions and bring them forward in a way that’s better for all of us.
SB: I think that’s definitely one aspect of it. The other aspect is having your eyes open to the fact that everything around you and every plant has a history socially, culturally, maybe medicinally, and almost all of them impart color in some way. It’s this very beautiful, holistic cycle with natural dyeing. As soon as you’re into it, you start looking for plants and then you start looking for plants that have specific colors or you start identifying them more and then certain plants become special – and then all of a sudden you’ve created a new map of your city.
I started having friends, giving me plants. My friend’s mom had an olive tree and some extra yarn. And I was so excited to dye that yarn – I didn’t need the yarn, I was just dyeing it and learning from it and then giving it back to her. I think the beautiful thing isn’t just the fashion and how things appear and the disconnect, but it also reconnects with the environment. It’s like a medium for talking to people, for experimentation, asking questions. You reconnect with the plants and then that’s a cycle to reconnect with the people, via making something and maybe somebody’s wearing it. Or if it’s art, making something and seeing it and resonating with it or taking it home, all these things.

SS: I’m interested in the different layers of connection, the way that you’ve come to know the place that you live in and the people, new and old, in your life.
SB: It’s been a beautiful journey, honestly, and I feel like I have so much still to learn. Currently, I’m in a residency in my home country, Saudi, and I’m trying to begin documenting the color of plants here. Even just asking people about it and telling people that I’m doing it is exciting people and opening doors, opening curiosities and making connections. I love that. I I think it’s a medium that is open to anybody because we all have things in our kitchen that make color and things outside. I’ve been really enjoying what is brought to my practice.
Also the group of people. I was looking for like-minded people for a long time, and I really found it through natural dying. The people who are interested in it tend to be an intersection of people who care about tradition and ancestral practices and the environment and art.

SS: You’re a very good advocate for the medium of dyeing.
SB: I mean, I love so many things. I work with film and performance and textile and now dyeing and cyanotype photography…and there’s so many special aspects to every medium. But I think in particular because we’re talking about tradition and new traditions, it feels like a vessel of all those things and really came into my life because of the pandemic.

We recently had the opportunity to connect with Christopher Dibble, photographer, and weaver based in Portland, OR. In conversation with Stephanie Sun. 

Applications are now *open* for our 2021 New Traditions Festival and close on July 30th.

S: What does the phrase ‘New Traditions’ mean to you?

C: ‘New traditions’ is a phrase that people use so often, but actually having to sit down and think about what it actually means to me was kind of fun. 

I think the phrase ‘new traditions’ can be a little bit of a paradox, but that’s one of the reasons why I like it. It leaves a lot of room for interpretation and having space to interpret that is important. It makes me think a lot about 2020 and all the holidays that I celebrated throughout 2020 that I normally spend with family. Each one involved ‘new traditions,’ because it was just my husband and I. During the pandemic, it was difficult to hold onto traditions – old traditions – which for me involve a lot of family and friends and food and gathering. So the new traditions that I explored in 2020 were a way that I could connect to the past while also thinking about the future.

New traditions are important, because old traditions can turn into habits or obligations and they can lose their significance rather easily. Not that old traditions are worth giving up – I have a lot of old traditions that I really enjoy. But the new traditions give a lot of flexibility and that keeps things interesting. 

S: You touch on a relatable point when you talk about how the context of living in a pandemic has forced this consideration of new traditions. Questioning what traditions we’re holding onto is something that many of us are having to really reevaluate, how we celebrate things, how we behave in different ways. It’s a universal reconsidering of all these traditions that we carry forward. 

C: What I find really interesting is the idea of traditions being rituals or things that are performed yearly. In general when speaking with other people about traditions, it’s about these events that happen on certain dates. But there is a lot of tradition also in craft and textiles. When you look up what ‘tradition’ means, it is a lot about teaching and passing things down. For me that was really eye-opening, recognizing that there’s a lot of tradition apart from holidays and celebrations. 

S: Thinking about traditions in regard to the arts and to craft, for me, it brings up the idea that there’s a way that things have always been done and how they ‘should be done.’

C: Absolutely, and this idea of breaking rules, when can I break rules…My career is in photography and it’s what I’ve been doing for 15 years. I was always so happy that I went to school for it, because I was really able to learn all of the rules, learn all of the traditions of photography. With a strong understanding of those traditions, then I’m able to break them, or experiment with them or change them to create these new traditions. 

S: It speaks to what we’ve all heard some variation of, that you have to learn the rules of whatever you’re doing before it’s acceptable for you to break them. It gets to the idea that everything new and experimental comes from a place that’s grounded in this historic knowledge and these traditions, and we’re just moving them forward in these different ways. 

C: That’s why it’s so interesting. I’m all for experimentation before knowing all of the rules – I think that’s also an important exploration. But it is nice to know the traditions and know the specific ways of doing something, so that you can use that information to figure out how to achieve the outcome you want to achieve. 

S: Even across different fields and industries, we’re all encouraged to start out at a certain point, to build this universal basis of knowledge, which allows us to connect from the outset.

C: Allowing us to be connected is something that’s so important with tradition. I feel that there can be a connection between me and a photographer who is taking portraiture one hundred years ago or when I’m weaving there is a connection between me and a weaver from a century ago, but also there’s a connection between me and my friend now who’s a weaver.

That connectedness is really interesting. And just as important as being connected and having similarities as other people, is the importance of having differences from other people and celebrating that as well. Through tradition, we can figure out our similarities and our differences, which is exciting.

S: It makes me wonder about how your creative practice has changed or transformed during the pandemic. And if the connection points that you’re talking about, the connections that we can find through similarities as well as the differences, have maybe been exacerbated during the pandemic? 

C: Well, I think so. I know a good deal of people personally who have been trying new things, learning new traditions because of the pandemic. If the pandemic hadn’t been around, then they wouldn’t be playing with ceramics or trying weaving or whatever. The pandemic has definitely pushed that. 

In terms of how my creative practice has grown or transformed…with photography it was totally put on hold. When the shutdown happened, all of the projects were paused. It picked up later on, just with a lot of protocols and new traditions. When I do a photoshoot now, there are waivers to be signed and everybody’s wearing masks. It’s a skeleton crew, me and the designer maybe, so there’s all sorts of new traditions there. 

With weaving, the pandemic has given me a lot more time to explore and experiment with weaving and just play around because I had more time to do that. It allowed me to put my creativity to other projects, like the film that I produced about contemporary Diné weavers, and allowed me time to begin Makers Union PDX and PDX Window Shop where we’re working with local makers to try and sell their goods and donate a portion to Black Resilience Fund. So it hasn’t changed my drive at all, but the drive has been dispersed into several different areas. I really enjoyed having that variety. 

S: It’s great to hear you talk about the different ways in which your practice has diversified. I’m curious to learn more about Makers Union and Window Shop, because they feel like they really speak to the moment and are so well suited to living in a pandemic and finding ways to support small businesses and artists. From a business or entrepreneurial side, they seem like a really smart pivot to be able to operate in this context.

C: Makers Union PDX started a year ago. It started with my friend MC Lemay, a builder of MC Lemay Designs. She’s a total badass builder who welds and cuts steel and does awesome stuff. MC reached out to me, saying “I want to do something, I want to help and I want to help the maker community.” She knew that I had done a lot of pop-ups and exhibitions through Stockpiler. We started talking about that and we hooked up with another friend of ours, Jubal Prevatte, of Carpentry PDX, who is this incredible builder who built a ton of restaurants and bars in town. And he had the exact same idea which he had been thinking about even before the pandemic. 

So the three of us got together and we formed Makers Union PDX, which is an online marketplace where we host makers throughout Portland and we sell their goods through this marketplace. 85% goes directly to the artists and 15% goes to a charity – the charity that we’ve been working with is Black Resilience Fund. That was a really great way that we could help build community and help support makers who either didn’t have their day job anymore or weren’t able to go to markets anymore. We just wanted to figure out a way that we could all come together and support each other, so we started Makers Union PDX.

When the holidays and 2020 came around, we started thinking about ways that we could do more. In-person markets and pop-ups still weren’t happening, and boutiques were open, but there weren’t a lot of people out and about shopping. At the same time, there were a lot of window spaces becoming vacant throughout the city. When we were thinking about doing pop-ups, I started reaching out to several boutiques and asking what they were doing for the holidays. I spoke with the owner of Woonwinkel, an awesome little shop downtown, and she was going to do these curated displays of Woonwinkel products in the vacant windows on her street and I thought that was a really incredible idea. We started talking about doing the same thing in different areas throughout Portland. We started talking to the makers from the Makers Union site and one of the makers, Sarah Lonnquist from Olander Earthworks, suggested we connect with Meghan Sinnott over at PortlandMade because she was talking about the exact same concept. 

So we reached out to Megan and ended up combining our forces and kicking this thing off, making it bigger than it could be if we were doing it on our own. And it’s been a really amazing project. At first we did three windows in November and we’ve done three windows in 2021. And we have four windows coming up, which is really great. We’ve been meeting a lot of new makers, half of the windows are BIPOC makers. There’s no fees to the artists and Window Shop doesn’t take a percentage. It’s a lot of looking for donations, for support from the building owners and local organizations. It’s definitely a labor of love and something that we’re all still really excited about. 

We teamed up with two designers, Shana McCullough and Elise Klein. They’re taking on the creative and art director role, respectively, curating windows and whatnot. 

S: It sounds like you’ve tapped into this way of building new traditions and new opportunities while also creating accessibility and community support and advocacy. It’s so many great things rolled into one.

C: Yeah, it’s a new way of online shopping. We’re putting QR codes onto the windows to encourage passersby to scan the QR code and they can shop directly – they can do literal window shopping in a way, which is something new – as opposed to being at home and going to an online store. This is a new way of looking at buying online: you’re seeing the actual product and you can go and buy it on the sidewalk. 

S: There’s something really generous about it. It’s not just you coming up with this new way for yourself to operate in this context, it’s also something that you’re sharing and encouraging communities to be a part of.

C: Yeah, that’s been a super important component, especially through the pandemic. I think promoting community in any way that we can is important. 

S: I’m thinking about how tradition fits into your creative communities. You’re part of the photography community, textiles, weaving, entrepreneurship… How do those work together for you? And how do you see traditions and traditional ways of doing things weaving throughout those? 

C: I definitely have my fingers in a lot of pies, I really enjoy being around people and working with people. Thinking about old traditions, with weaving it’s performing the same tasks that have been practiced for centuries. Same thing with photography – like what we were talking about before – how I’m able to have this connection with people who have done the same tasks and motions and practices before me.

With creating new traditions, I like the idea of gently disrupting the status quo. With photography, I enjoy prompting people to stop and think about an image.

S: I was thinking about your photography practice, with portraiture and interior design and how that might’ve changed during the pandemic. We’ve all been wearing masks for over a year now and also the majority of us have been spending so much more time at home than we used to. We’re much more deeply embedded in our living spaces, and I wonder if those factors have impacted how you approach photography or if that’s changing how you’re thinking about it.

C:  Yeah, it’s really interesting because portraiture is what I started with when I started photography and then I transitioned into interiors. Those are two areas that don’t necessarily go with each other: one is dealing with humans and expressions and how light falls on the face and creating a story in a single image, and the next is shooting a space and inanimate objects and things that are not going to talk and react to me. That’s been a really fun and interesting way to work, because I want to bring the way that I photograph people into how I photograph spaces. 

I’ve had several portrait shoots during the pandemic and what I’ve found interesting is everybody wants to shoot without a mask. I enjoy making a point to photograph people from a very safe distance, outside, while I’m double-masked, but I want to photograph them with their masks on as well, because to me, photography is a recording of history and that is important to me.

I want to capture these images of people wearing masks; that’s been a way that the pandemic has affected my work as well, going back to new traditions of wearing a mask. 

S: I think it’s interesting that you’ve emphasized taking portraits with masks, especially thinking about how much more social weight seeing peoples’ faces carries right now.

C: I’m invested in this idea of the importance of seeing people’s entire faces. It’s what we – people who are all over a certain age – have always seen. That’s how we recognize people and it’s been a really interesting thing to experience and witness.

S: It’s like finding a balance between normalizing the way that we see each other now while still holding on to these traditions, these old ways that we’ve always relied upon for getting to know each other. 

C: Yes, exactly. What I find fascinating as a photographer and want to explore more is how can I create a portrait of someone with a mask and still have that image be impactful and not just tell a story about the time that we’re living in, but tell a story about that person. It’s an interesting challenge. 

S: The last question that I’d love to touch upon ties back into what we’ve talked about already. What are some new traditions that you’ve learned or incorporated into your life personally and creatively, entrepreneurially that you would want to share with others? 

C: There are so many new traditions that I’ve had to learn and incorporate and embrace. 

With photography it’s all about new ways of working with people. I love producing imagery, but for me, one of the biggest joys of photography was being on set, the camaraderie, the collaboration, seeing friends that I only work with. That’s definitely been something that I’ve had to learn, incorporate, and embrace, because in the beginning it was like all the joy was taken out of photography, because it was just me and one other person and we’re trying to get the job done as quickly as possible so that we can not be in a house for hours and hours on end. But through shooting more and really thinking about it, there is still so much joy there. It just took a little bit to think about and get to. 

It can be difficult and lonesome, but if you think about it, you can turn it around – I can think, wow, it is actually amazing that I can produce this work on my own. It’s something that I can feel proud about.

I recently had a book come out called ‘Modern Americana’ that I did with a designer, Max Humphrey, and a co-writer, Chase Reynolds Ewold. The fact that we were able to produce something like 75 images over the summer of 2020 is mind blowing to me.

This is something I want to share with others – try and look at the adversity that you’re facing and see if there is a way to pivot that. 

Pivot, that’s been the word of the pandemic, hasn’t it? Maybe you can pivot it and look at things from a different way that makes you feel really good and really proud. That’s something that I would share, looking at obstacles in a different way and turning them into something positive. 

Don’t we all need that? Don’t we all need some positivity and levity in our lives right now? And sometimes we have to find that within ourselves.

S: One hundred percent. I think a lot of the new traditions that we’ve been forced into logistically – wearing masks, having to adjust how we do our work, how we see our friends and our family – are just new traditions that we’ve, by necessity, been needing to pivot to. But what you’re talking about is so important, the mental and emotional reframing, reevaluating and pivoting and creating our own new traditions about how we’re approaching these things.

C: Totally, and when you mentioned how we see our families, I was realizing a new tradition that my husband and I have been doing is twice a week we do a Zoom call with my mom and my sister and we chat for 15 or 20 minutes. And then we all watch a TV program together, which is something we would never think to do before the pandemic. Because of that, we have spent more virtual time with my sister and my mom than we ever would have before. It’s definitely something that we’ll continue to do even when we can see each other. That’s been a really great new tradition that we formed.

S: Yeah, that’s wonderful, and it’s exactly those new ways of connecting that we’re building which feel like some of the most hopeful pieces that we can hold on to moving forward. 

C: Totally. And that will be something that’s really interesting moving forward. When the world opens up a little bit more, what will we take, what traditions, what new traditions will then become old traditions or just don’t happen anymore? For me, I kind of love the idea of when I get on a plane, when I go on a flight putting on a mask and instead of loading up on Emergen-C and getting sick after a flight. I think it’ll be interesting to see what carries over post-pandemic. 

We recently had the opportunity to connect with artist Lauren Prado and discuss her take on the theme of New Traditions, how her creative practice has shifted during our global pandemic, and more. Lauren works with a variety of textiles in her practice, exploring and challenging representations of the digital images and products which flood our online feeds.

We’re excited to share that conversation here.

What does the phrase “New Traditions” mean to you? 

Taking a custom or practice and making it fit into your lifestyle. My grandmother taught me the basics of sewing as a child, a skill she believed should be passed down. I learned how to sew buttons and fix a hem but I took that knowledge she handed down to me and used it as a tool for personal expression. No longer just a practice for tailoring clothes, but for making my junior high backpack look cool with hand-sewn patches! I took our family’s tradition of teaching women to sew and made it fit my life in a new way. 

How has your creative practice changed/grown/transformed during this time of global social and cultural upheaval? 

During these unprecedented times, I have found myself unable to finance a studio space large enough to continue making large-scale rugs. I have turned my sights back to hand sewing and have been creating smaller work for the time being. Forcing myself to continue to use my hands daily instead of being constantly glued to a screen. This past year has been very stressful and truthfully that has made feeling creative very difficult for me personally. 

How do you think about traditions in your creative process/work? 

I have always been taught that one should learn the rules and then learn how to break them. In my first fabrics art class, the professor told me right away that I needed to learn the basic rules before I started to stray away from the rules. I laughed, but of course I followed her advice. Who would have thought that the advice would stick with me to this day! Just like traditions that were taught to me, I had to learn them as they were before making them fit my mold. 

I also think about the intersection of repetition and learning and how it truly is the core of tradition. This crossroads seems to have parallels with my art-making process of sewing and rug making. Constantly making tedious, repetitious, laborious actions are at the center of my art practice. Is it because a function of tradition is the process of repetition itself? 

Are there traditions that you are influenced by or intentionally draw from for your work? Traditions that you break from? 

When in the realm of textile work, I understand how rugs fit into the traditional sphere of livable, usable, utilitarian objects made of yarn but I also see a strong break from these traditional functions and space with my personal work. I make rugs that are starkly white, a color that brings about the fear of stains for most people. My rugs are the complete opposite of what you would look for in a utilitarian house rug. I have recently even tried to shift from the traditional shape of a rectangle rug and have begun cutting them to fit what I am representing on the rug itself.

Are there new traditions that you’ve learned/ incorporated/ embraced and want to share with others? 

When I started working with a tufting gun, I found it so difficult to find artists who were willing to share their knowledge with me. I tried to message people who I saw online making rugs, asking questions that ranged from tips on how to use the tufting gun to what kind of fabric they were using. Ultimately many of these people acted like gatekeepers of information and refused to open the doors to new hands. 

It’s ironic that these textile artists refused to share their knowledge when their medium itself is based on passing down information generation to generation. It felt like they wanted to keep these skills locked away, keeping it as an exclusive tradition that only the elite could have access to. I found this to be very off-putting! I told myself that once I was proficient in the practice I would share my insight with all and any who were interested. I want to pass down all my knowledge of the trade to those who want to know, just like my grandmother passed down the steps of sewing to me. I refuse to be a gatekeeper of exclusion, but instead wish to follow the blueprints of how traditions are started…by sharing information!  Every time I share my knowledge with others, I gain more knowledge through that interchange. 

From your perspective, how does tradition fit into the textile community? 

The textile community exists because the knowledge of these practices was continuously passed down through generations over the span of human existence! Tradition and textiles are different sides of the same coin, while tradition is remembering the past it’s also about sharing it with those who will be the future. It’s how the fabric of our society continues to evolve. 

Creating spaces to share knowledge, like making a tik-tok of how you set up your tufting gun or making a youtube video on how to cross-stitch helps the textile community not only learn but thrive. In a society where we have been pushed to exist almost completely virtually this is the new normal, creating digital space and a digital platform for interconnectivity between textile artists is the newest form of tradition that is unspoken and unconsciously participated in by many.

Interview by Stephanie Sun.

Images provided by Lauren Prado.

We are pleased to introduce Fuchsia Lin in our stories community spotlight. Costume designer, dance choreographer, and filmmaker Fuchsia Lin invents unearthly garments, mythic universes, and stirring gestural languages in her dance films. After six years of work, her forthcoming film “Future Cosmos Flow” is scheduled for release in Winter of 2021.  Follow her journey on her Facebook page and consider supporting her Future Cosmos Flow film through her donation page!

How does reuse or upcycling figure into your work?

Since the fabric stores have been closed [due to the pandemic], I’ve been going through my fabric stock and using what I can to create mock-ups of pieces I’m working on. I just got rid of an old duvet cover that I had for 20 years and am using it to create a mock-up of some large wings for a new costume.

I often have fabrics donated to me that need a new home. One time when I lived in Paris, my friend gave me all this leather in bright beautiful colors that came from the atelier of the legendary French fashion designer Claude Montana after his company closed. I used the leather to create several statement pieces that ended up receiving a lot of exposure and have been some of my all-time favorite pieces I’ve made.

For the upcoming Oregon Ballet Theatre (OBT) and Pink Martini performance that I’m designing the costumes for, I’m working with Tara St. James, a consultant based in NYC who has in-depth knowledge of sustainable textiles and apparel production. Tara is helping me to source responsible fabrics for this costume build. I’m especially interested in this 4-way stretch fabric that’s perfect for dancewear and made by the Italian company Carvico. It’s made from Econyl yarn, a nylon material made from ocean and landfill waste. I also source fabrics from Fabscrap, a wonderful organization in NYC that recycles and redistributes textiles gathered from the fashion and entertainment industry, saving them from the landfill.

Is it important to you to use your artwork as a tool for education and activism?

Definitely yes. In my marketing, promotional materials, and social media platforms, I always highlight that my costumes are built utilizing sustainable materials.

For the upcoming OBT project I’m designing costumes for, choreographer Nicolo Fonte agreed to my ethics of using sustainable materials for the costume build. This is a momentous step forward for the costuming industry to take toward a more sustainable future. I’m so excited to show other costume designers and my audience that beautiful and sophisticated costumes can be made from sustainable materials. This is so much more effective than just telling people statistics and data.

How are you staying connected with your creative network while adhering to social distancing guidelines? 

Fortunately, my partner Stephen is also my film collaborator and we are able to continue working on our projects. We are still planning to film this summer for Future Cosmos Flow, and Stephen and I have been able to storyboard and discuss cinematography. I have tried to have Zoom meetings with the dancers to talk about the choreography, but for costume fittings, I will have to get creative how to go about fitting the dancers and remain safe.

Author:

Sebastian Zinn has a B.A. in Comparative Literature with an allied field in Art History from Reed College. Since graduating in the Spring of 2018, he has been working as a freelance writer and editor covering a diverse range of topics, including visual and performance art, fashion, literature, film, music, healthcare and economics. He is currently producing social media and blog content for Portland Textile Month.

Kristin Van Buskirk of Woonwinkel (left), artist Dianee Da’Lama (Center), and Haley Dunham of Woonwinkel at the Magical Landscapes PTM 2019 event. Photo by Caleb Sayan

If you’ve ever found yourself surrounded by vases coated in vivid pastel glazes, or pillows adorned by unexpectedly pleasing arrangements of abstract shapes, you’ve probably stumbled upon Woonwinkel. Located in SW Portland, and owned and operated by Kristin Van Buskirk, Woonwinkel carries goods manufactured by small-scale designers from all over the U.S. While Kristin temporarily closed her brick-and-mortar store to comply with social distancing guidelines, Woonwinkel’s colorful cache of home goods is still available for purchase through their online store. They are currently offering free local delivery.

Kristin is hard at work applying for federal grants so that she can guarantee her employees’ salaries. Please support them if you are able, so that Kristin and her coworkers can continue to bring exuberance and vibrancy to homes throughout the PNW.

Has Woonwinkel been affected by the outbreak of COVID-19?

Yes. We rely on foot traffic from downtown residents and workers, as well as tourists. So while we (thankfully!) already had an online shop up and running, the vast majority of our sales were previously done in the store. This, of course, has meant a significant drop in sales—enough to impact my ability to pay my awesome team.

Do you anticipate that this outbreak will require you to restructure your business in the near future?

Perhaps. Although I’m holding out hope that I’ll qualify for the new Paycheck Protection Program recently passed by Congress, the funds would only last for a period of 8 weeks. No one really knows what will happen beyond those 8 weeks. I imagine this could mean changes to my business but I’m trying not to get too ahead of myself—a lot of what we need to do now is to be watchful and ready to adapt, whatever may come our way. People who hate change are probably having a really rough time right now!  

How do you hope to continue to provide your goods and services to your local community as this crisis develops?

A small part of my team has been keeping our little cogs in motion through web orders and local deliveries. We’re doing the free local delivery as a thanks to our loyal supporters here in the area. Aside from delivering goods, if you’ve been following Woonwinkel for a little while, you know we believe in the power of color to evoke emotion; it can be a powerful tool and force for good. I hope that SOON I’ll be able to offer inspiring and optimistic content for our social media and email followers, using the power of color to uplift—but right now I still feel challenged to keep up with disaster loan applications, learning what I can do for my employees, and trying to educate a kid. It’s hard—I want to feed my customers’ souls and of course literally feed my employees’ bellies, but really it’s the customers who are giving us the most right now. We’ve had such a wonderful outpouring of support from folks who want to see our small biz survive and I don’t know what I’d do without them.

Who are some of your favorite creators in the PNW who have goods in your stores? 

Textiles: Studio Proba, Sarah Wertzberger, Primecut /// Furniture: Matthew Philip Williams, Merkled Studio /// Ceramics: The Granite, Peaches /// Glass: Esque /// Jewelry: Love Oru, Natalie Joy, Favor, Minoux /// Apothecary: Crosby Elements /// Paper: March, Alli Stocco

Author:

Sebastian Zinn has a B.A. in Comparative Literature with an allied field in Art History from Reed College. Since graduating in the Spring of 2018, he has been working as a freelance writer and editor covering a diverse range of topics, including visual and performance art, fashion, literature, film, music, healthcare and economics. He is currently producing social media and blog content for Portland Textile Month.