Anna Pollice

Wefting the Warp

This research-creation is about difference-becoming-movement, the potentia of difference, and the generative and productive quality of becoming. Drawing from material feminism, relational movement and research-creation, difference-becoming-movement is explored through a simple weaving technique on a modified frame loom that created relational movements. Referencing the work of cultural theorists and material feminist Rosi Braidotti and philosophers of affect, Erin Manning, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Wefting the Warp aims to materialize the rejection of binary oppositions in favour of movements that create new and unpredictable shapes and forms. The multi-directional loom I use moves past the rectilinear frame as one way to relate to the loom and the woven work. The woven textiles express multiple relations that I come to sense as movements that are akin to an improvised dance with the loom. This “dance” is materialized between me and the loom, as well as the warp and weft yarns. Inspired by material feminist perspectives of sexual difference, irreducible difference in this thesis is not something to be neutralized, but rather, acknowledged and activated. Difference is acknowledged through movements that produce woven textiles “off the grid,” thus, seeking new corporeal forms with no starting point, no end point, and certainly no definitive centre.

 2022