Stina BaudinData Studies 2.1: We shall thank you to carefully examine and fit, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist

Errant Abstraction

Adam Lauder

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Contemporary artists are unravelling the threads that connect abstraction to computation and textiles. Recently on view at the National Gallery of Canada, the travelling exhibition Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction proposes an ambitious counter-history of abstraction rooted “in the everyday world” of fibre media and self-fashioning.¹ 1 - Lynne Cooke, “Modernist Histories: Braided, Interlaced, and Aligned,” in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, ed. Lynne Cooke (Washington, DC and Chicago: National Gallery of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2023), 3. Long neglected by art historians as the product of “women’s work,” the warp and weft of textiles are finally gaining recognition as a decisive point of origin for that enduring symbol of abstraction, the grid.

In her catalogue essay accompanying Woven Histories, the media art historian Michelle Kuo excavates the relationship between the grid structure of woven cloth and the evolving role of computation in textile manufacturing — from the binary punch cards that powered nineteenth-century Jacquard looms to the global circuits of contemporary fast fashion.² 2 - See Michelle Kuo, “Textility and Technology,” in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, ed. Lynne Cooke(Washington, DC and Chicago: National Gallery of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2023), 225–43. Well beyond the roster of Woven Histories, contemporary artists are pursuing parallel explorations of abstraction’s kinship with textiles and adjacent algorithmic practices.