Unraveling Together

...at the beginning of the pandemic, I was invited to do an artist residency at BioBAT Art Space at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. During my residency I began to explore notions of "unraveling", both literally and metaphorically. I created an installation of textiles and video that incorporated the yarn I had spun from laboratory animals with unraveled threads for a new project connecting the unique experiences and traumas of the pandemic moment. I invited both artists and non artists from anywhere in the world to participate in collaborative unraveling performances over zoom. And during these sessions we unraveled textiles, while discussing the pandemic in wandering conversations that ranged from the personal to the political to the social. With our webcams trained on our hands and not on our heads, our minds were allowed to wander during the meditative active unraveling in ways that were unencumbered by the typical self-conscious anxieties triggered by video conferencing early on in the pandemic. The project is part oral history, part conceptual craft. Our performance attempts to unravel unique and shared experiences of trauma and resilience during the global health crisis. The video was displayed on top of cinder blocks found in the vast hallways of the army terminal and layered in the videos of the recorded zoom sessions, that I conducted with both friends and strangers. During my residency at BioBAT, participants would mail me their unraveled threads that resulted from our zoom sessions. And they would often include personal notes about the sense of catharsis they felt during the soothing activity of unraveling. These threads unraveled during our sessions were installed with a weaving loom and skeins of llama and alpaca fiber in the gallery. And during my residency I began weaving the unraveled threads into tapestries that incorporate the hand spun fiber of the laboratory animals. The video project also generated text artifacts including AI-transcribed excerpts that are of varying legibility due to transcription errors. Their technological annotations of time and imperfect transcription are reflective in their own way of the sense of disruption we've felt in relation to time and communication during the pandemic, a feeling that is at once alleviated and exacerbated by technologies like video conferencing...
— Laura Splan on Unraveling Together in an Artist Talk for "Material Healing:fabrics, materials, and substances changing our concept of remedy" at Leonardo LASER Arizona State University