Welcome to the TextileX resource guide—a growing effort created to map out and connect the vibrant textile community and resources in the Portland metro area and beyond. The foundation of this guide was built from the diversity of organizations that participate in the Portland TextileX Month festival every October.
Development of and funding for this guide have been provided by Textile Hive with additional funding from a RACC catalyst grant in 2019.
We encourage you to contribute additional resources through this form and consider becoming a member of TextileX to help further develop this resource guide as well as Portland TextileX Month.
Studios
Fuchsia Lin
Fuchsia Lin is a Taiwanese-American artist, fashion/costume designer and filmmaker, called a visionary by the Seattle Times for the imaginative art and performance work she has produced. Fuchsia began her career as a fashion designer, studying at Parsons School of Design in NYC. Years later, Fuchsia turned to the medium of film to showcase her fashion and costume designs in motion. Her first short film, Crystals of Transformation, went on to win her a scholarship award to study fashion filmmaking at London College of Fashion, one of two universities in the world that teaches fashion filmmaking. Fuchsia is currently finishing up her second film, Future Cosmos Flow, a fantasy drama film. This film features more than 40 custom couture pieces made from sustainable materials Fuchsia designed especially for the film, worn and set in motion by award-winning performers. Future Cosmos Flow is a genre-bending film and magical fairy tale inspired by mythology and the natural elements. An exiled royal family must learn to harness a mystical water-power to subdue a tyrannical Uncle who threatens the ecological survival of their Kingdom. It relates to our modern day need for the renewed care of our environment. Fuchsia will speak about her journey from costume designer to filmmaker. She will share how she uses the medium of film to show fashion in motion and tell a story through textiles. And she’ll show excerpts from her new film, Future Cosmos Flow, which will be screened at a special event at the Portland Art Museum in 2024.
Studios
Megita Denton
Intermedia artist that deeply intertwines my agricultural/land-based background. My focus is sustainability in ecological systems by utilizing all practices of – film at https://vimeo.com/megdenton, contemporary furniture, paintings, sculptures, sound, textiles, print media, welding, performance art, design, resilient landscapes, woodworking, murals with Art Seed PDX, photography, site specific public works, Nature based forms called ‘bio-anchors’ and often large formats to fit my big moods of passion. A true multidisciplinary artist.
Exploratory endeavors of environment, collaborations, and expressing interconnectedness fuels my work and relation to others, the natural and spiritual arenas- in pursuit of positive change and consciousness. I am building on the elevation of my Indigenous cultural perspective and using detritus to evoke a powerful sense of nostalgia that emits joy, contemplation, connection, and inspiration.
With a bedded foundation in the PNW soil from artistic, agricultural, and culinary roots - I have been circling with vibrations from these and filtering them through my lens. Land is the mesa from which I push and pull my art from. So, sit down at the table with me and let’s move art together…
Studios
Rankin Renwick
Founder and janitor of the Oregon Department of Kick Ass
Rankin Renwick is an artist by nature, not by stress of research. They put scholars to rout by embracing nature's teaching problems that have fretted trained minds. Working in experimental and poetic documentary forms, their iconoclastic work embodies their interest in landscape and transformation, and relationships between bodies and landscapes, and all sorts of borders.
They have been a singular voice in the experimental cinema for over 20 years. Eschewing an allegiance to any one medium or form, Renwick builds authentic moving image works revealing an insatiable curiosity and unflinching engagement with the world around them. Often focusing their lens on nature, freedom and the locales of their adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, Renwick uses avant-garde formal elements to explore radical politics and environmental issues. An artist who often self-distributes, their screening history reads as a map of independent cinema worldwide. They have screened work in hundreds of venues internationally, institutional and not, including The Museum of Modern Art, Light Industry, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Basel, Oberhausen, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Centre Pompidou, Bread and Puppet Theater and True/False Film Festival, among many others.
Rankin Olivia Metolius Renwick is a non-binary artist of Scottish and German descent, born on the traditional and unceded territory of the Illiniwek in what is now known as Chicago, Illinois. They live and work as an uninvited guest on the traditional territory of the Chinookan peoples, now known as Portland, Oregon.
Studios
Studio Abioto
https://www.studioabioto.com/midnight-seed
Midnight Seed is a muse, a consummate lover, an oracle, a mystic, and a mother of five goddesses. Her tools are culinary arts, wordsmithing, spirit law, and storyteller. For over thirty years, she practiced human rights law throughout the byways and highways of Mississippi. She is a culinary evolutionary storyteller "Green Lady" and she has brought her southern roots to vegan and vegan sun foods from the south to the northwest. Combining writing, theatre, law, and spirit; she has been led in the spirit to create "Holy Mojo", a spiritual interactive theatre, "Legal Oracle", a publishing company engaged in the interpretation of world issues from a cultural metaphysical perspective as it impacts people of color, " O'zeal Inspirational Spa", a spirit healing modality, "Midnight Seed" a mystical apothecary and "Green Lady" a living light food vegan cafe. She is a queen mother of five women who have brought their extraordinary qualities to the earth and for this, she is most grateful. She is a consummate lover of life evolving and bursting boundaries of preconceived dogma and for that, she is most blessed.