Drop Stitch
ORGANIZED BY JOELLE SANDFORT AND WANUFI TESHOME
JANUARY 13TH - FEBRUARY 17TH, 2023
Drop Stitch is an interchange across disciplines between lifelong friends. In written text and experimental textiles, Wanufi Teshome and Joelle Sandfort reflect on how cultural information is generated, inherited, or lost. Woven, knitted, and altered artifacts scattered among fragments of text throughout the exhibition position the interconnectedness of storytelling and cloth as an invitation to recalibrate familiar notions of language, myth, and meaning.
Generator Grant programming is presented with support from the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
Did I ever tell you how the world came to be?
Written by Wanufi Teshome
The universe bore three daughters.
Each child carried her likeness,
but almost as soon as they broke from her,
they began behaving in novel and unpredictable
ways.
This was a strange experience for the universe,
she had once been everything,
but now she was not.
Her daughters began pulling creations from
themselves and displayed them
with pride and excitement.
Having already made the most precious beings
she could imagine,
the universe struggled to understand the
oddities they presented.
But she loved her daughters,
so by extension,
she loved their clumsy creations.
The universe was unaware
that her daughters differed from her
in one crucial way.
She was infinite and they were not.
With every invention, her daughters’
forms and consciousnesses split,
transforming into something new.
When the universe realized this,
she tried to alter their fate,
but her daughters would not stop creating.
In the end, she was left with their pieces.
From these pieces, she tried
to reconstruct her daughters
into their original forms,
but their fragments would not bind.
She pulled on the scraps
of her daughters until they became thin threads.
Then she began to weave.
It was an intricate and nonsensical pattern,
a maze of endings and beginnings.
Once the tapestry was complete,
she swept it over herself and slept.
As she lay, the threads strained against
the pattern their mother wove them into,
seeking to unravel.
Her daughters traced their mother’s pattern
and slowly disentangled themselves
until small openings filled the tapestry.
Inside these gaps
they stretched themselves,
using the space to make new creations.
Installation Images
Photos: Debra S. Kaplan
From the Artists
We approached this collaboration with an acknowledgement of the countless interconnections between storytelling and cloth throughout time. Both mythological and historical stories served as inspiration for our process. Our discussions of the relationships between story and cloth prompted Wanufi to write the origin myth above. It is the narrative structure for both the handmade and collected textiles and artifacts in the exhibition.
The title of the exhibition, Drop Stitch, comes from a knitting technique used to create open areas in a knitted piece of cloth. Often seen as mistakes, dropped stitches can cause parts of a knit to unravel unless they are picked back up and secured. If used intentionally, dropped stitches create patterns in the space between knots of yarn, a technique used in several works in the show.
Whether it is knitted or woven, making cloth is like making a story—building up rows, breaking a seam, sewing pieces together, writing first words, changing sentence structure, brining ideas together, etc. Stories and cloth are also similar in how they are shared—signifying our origins, passing on knowledge, and offering up new frameworks for being. Drop Stitch invites us to reflect on how how cultural information is generated, inherited, altered, or lost.
About the Artists
Joelle Wellansa Sandfort is an interdisciplinary artist living in Omaha, NE. She makes drawings, textiles and installations using mostly second hand materials. She is the current Facilitator of Fleabane Gallery and a 2022 member of the Amplify Arts Alternate Currents Working group. Her work has been exhibited at Elder Gallery (Lincoln), Eisentrager-Howard Gallery (Lincoln), Tugboat Gallery (Lincoln), Confluence (Lincoln), San Paro (Lincoln) and Sanctuarium (Omaha). Joelle earned her BA in Art from Nebraska Wesleyan in 2018.
Wanufi Teshome is based in Brooklyn, NY and enjoys writing science fiction, children's books and essays. In 2021, her microfiction piece, "We Met the Gods" was selected for online publication in Blind Corner Literary Magazine's speculative microfiction contest. Wanufi graduated cum laude and with distinction from Kenyon College with a BA in Sociology. She is passionate about empowering young people and supporting their growth. She has experience working in government, non-profits, and political campaigns. She currently works at Minds Matter NYC.