Woven Room was an attempt to use my body to weave a skeletal upper-class middle room theater set. I was interested in weaving as an aggressive performative act, the resulting physical product the record of passage of time. I drew upon notions of home and collection for inspiration. Author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes in, The Age of Homespun, "The mythology of household production (in Victorian times) gave something to everyone. For sentimentalists, spinning and weaving represented the centrality of home and family, for evolutionists the triumph of civilization over savagery, for craft revivalists the harmony of labor and art, for feminists, women's untapped productive power, and for anti-modernists the virtues of a bygone age."

The sound for this piece was culled from over 300 answering machine tapes collected over a period of four years throughout the southeast. The majority of these tapes were slyly taken out of obsolete machines and then purchased for about ten to forty cents apiece. The sound designer, Angus Galloway, came over to my house one day and I showed him the hoard of tapes accumulating in a desk drawer. He suggested that we listen to them and draw simultaneously. We found ourselves slowly drawn in by stories of carpools, awkward introductions, and occasional booty calls. The collection kept growing and I resolved that someday, somewhere, I’d do something with this vast trove that seemed to weave itself together so naturally.

I have always thought that the most powerful visual metaphor for history is a knot--wrought and wrangled around itself. Textiles, like photographs, are composed of tiny little knots that capture the moments of our lives.

Photography Ken Yee and Inez Liftig