Dominguez Hultgren is a textile artist pulling from a wide variety of textile methods and heritages. Originally taught to weave by indigenous Mapuche women in Argentina, she pulls from that history, using natural materials and techniques developed long before steel. She then intertwines modern materials such as plastics and works designed on a computer and realized on a jacquard loom to create her works.
Dominguez Hultgren’s newest exhibition “Our Daily Parenthetical” uses the shape of the parenthetical ( ) as a structural argument about how race is a contextual aside woven into every story she’s told or is telling.
The parentheses is also a shape on the loom called a “heddle” (like the eye of a needle) and how that thread and heddle interact determine the structure of the whole fabric. Interestingly, indigenous, portable looms use a continuous string of yarn to make heddles that can be moved around on different threads of the loom while weaving so there is a lot of flexibility in the final fabric. But using string heddles to weave is slow. In Europe, the heddle was turned into steel (more durable and efficient for weaving) and suddenly the fabric was fixed being whatever it started out as. It’s hard to change a fabric that’s been threaded on a steel heddle loom.
Dominguez Hultgren digs into the metaphor of colonialist cultures being more rigid structures vs. a more flexible, changeable, indigenous structure.
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