If you have visited the Origins and Legacies Gallery by Textile Hive this Portland TextileX Month, your eye may have been drawn skyward. Sailing above the entrance to the galleries, leading guests to the two exhibits filling the galleries with patchwork leather fashion pieces and masterful Peruvian embroidery, are three delicate and colorful floating kites designed and built by Lucas Cantoni Jose @asflortudo.

Lucas is still figuring out how kites work. Most folks would say that it’s the responsibility of the kite to take flight in response to the force of air currents, in response to the manipulation to the being on the other end of the string that keeps them tethered to the earth. In less words, their job is to fly. Not all of Lucas’s kites fly.

 But maybe that’s okay.

For Lucas, making a kite is more about finding a way to cast the feeling of the wind into a sculptural form. “It started from this personal connection with the wind,” they say, “the stories in the back of my head about wind’s presence and the spiritual connection you can have to it.” This connection was explored as part of Lucas’s recent Master’s thesis in Print Media at Pacific Northwest College of Art. “I was in a moment of feeling down, and I wanted to make something that would lift my spirit a little bit. One of my professors connected me with another artist-professor, Koichi Yamamoto, who could maybe give me some technical tips on how to make a kite. When we talked, it turned into this whole forty-five minute long presentation about the wind, and how the wind is the central character in this whole adventure.”

Rethinking kites as a relationship less to the act of flying and more to one’s relationship to the wind changed Lucas’s whole connection to the work. “These connections were already in my life, in my hand. I didn’t even notice until I talked to Koichi, but I have a tattoo on my hand that reads ‘vento’ which is wind in Portuguese.” Like the kite picked up by a sudden gust of wind, the string tying Lucas to this concept was suddenly taut and tugging at their hand, pulling them to create.

Lucas’s kites are wonderful, ethereal things, often imprinted with delicate pastel hues that seem to catch the colors of a slow-setting sun. They make use of geometric shapes that appear as  runic figures made material, communicating stories in the sky. As part of the programming for Portland TextileX Month, Lucas will be leading a kitemaking workshop on November 16th, from 12-2 PM, in the Origins and Legacies Gallery, so you will also have the opportunity to build one of these beautiful, sculptural kites of your own. The registration for this workshop is open now at textilex.org.

If you happen to be visiting the Origins and Legacies Gallery to see “Dakota Transit: Sonic Couture” or “Threads of Time: Textile Legacies from Junín, Peru” or one of the many other workshops and events hosted there during PTXM 2024, don’t forget to look up: you’ll see kites in perpetual flight.