On Weaving: A Conversation with Sophy Naess

Friday Arts

Tell us about your weaving practice and your grandmother’s influence.

Sophy Naess

My father was born in Norway and my grandmother learned weaving in Norway. When I was a kid, my grandparents were living outside of Madison, Wisconsin. And my grandmother by that time had a pretty big herd of sheep. I would go help her tend to these sheep, feed them. She would shear them and even deliver the lambs in the spring.

I'm not quite sure how she gained all those skills, but she spun wool. She dyed wool. She did lots of knitting, and she had a really large, beautiful loom. I was around her a lot as a kid in her weaving room. I think that was a really important experience for me, even though she didn't identify as an artist. But she absolutely had a kind of studio space that was very much her space. I remember it was adorned with all of these little ribbons that she had won for her sheep in different sheep competitions.

I remember climbing on her loom a lot as a kid, but not operating it. When I was in high school, I was a little more interested in seeing how the loom worked, but I was always very intimidated by it. So she would sometimes have it already warped and set up for me and I made a long scarf in college. And I basically just sat at her bench and everything was already in order so I learned how to operate the pedals and put the shuttle through the warps. But I still felt like it was out of reach for me because the setup was so complicated.

I think I was preconditioned to be interested in weaving. And I've thought about how various social forces kind of discouraged me from taking that seriously when I was younger. I wanted to be an artist, but the way that that was presented to me did not include weaving, which I think my family regarded just as kind of a craft.

In your Weaver’s Discourse writings you mentioned how your grandmother was interested in precision, following a pattern, which is different from your interest in a relationship to weaving that shows the artist's hand. Can you elaborate on that?

When I started weaving, I was aware that my lack of technical knowledge was maybe an asset. I made all these weird, interesting mistakes in the beginning that I can't really replicate now. I think many artists have that experience. So I was always interested in the glitchy qualities of weaving—seeing a painted mark that was submitted to a machine is what got me interested in it to begin with. I was very curious about these forces kind of beyond my control, although now I'm able to control them better. But the idea that tensions would appear in the image just by nature of this process of putting the image into this machine, that was my initial excitement. So for me, that was about some kind of, I don't know—modernist self-criticality, seeing the image coming undone relative to the media that it's arising from.

My grandmother made really beautiful, functional stuff. When I've tried to make similar work myself, I feel this kind of melancholy that no one will even think about who made it. It kind of ends up looking sort of mass-produced. I think people in my family remember my grandmother's scarves, and if I can emulate them, we all are called back to her work. But if I give those to my friends, I feel like they have scarves that probably look much flashier that they paid ten bucks for. I just wanted to be more visible in the work.

Over the years, I've become more and more interested in pattern weaving and more complex weave structures. So I've come to have more and more reverence for my grandmother's abilities.

What was the moment when you embraced weaving for the first time?

When I was grad school, I was invited to make illustrations of a conversation that was happening around cooperative structures. One of the people who I met there was working in sustainable fashion at Parsons and invited me to join a Marxist feminist quilting group she organized called Work Circles. Long story short, a lot of the people that were present for that were textile artists, and they were very generous with their knowledge and there was a lot of skill sharing.

At one point, someone brought in a sample of some cloth she’d woven. It was an example of a painted warp technique where you have your warp threads on the loom, but before weaving into them to consolidate the cloth, you paint on the warps. And they tend to move a little bit relative to the tension on the loom. I was very interested in this peculiar situation of a painted mark then being subject to this unfixed surface, and that the painted mark was totally embedded into the cloth rather than painted on top of canvas, which was already woven.

Coincidentally, a friend of mine was trying to find a home for the loom that had belonged to her mother who had passed away a few years before. She offered me her mom's loom, and we tied it up with all these ropes on the back of a station wagon, and drove it back to Brooklyn where I was living.

Then someone who I had gone to grad school with, who is very much identified as a painter, revealed that she had some nostalgia for her undergrad fibers education and was very eager to teach me how this thing worked. This friend, Rachel Malin, was kind of my weaving guru and assistant and helped me learn how to warp the loom, which I'm now able to do by myself. So that was the beginning. It was very exciting in a lot of different ways. All of these sort of metaphors of many different fibers all being harnessed together into different kinds of structures.

How would you describe weaving to someone who knows nothing about it?

There are two sets of components that are interlaced. They go over and under each other to make cloth. The warps are the ones that can be manipulated to go above or below the surface of the cloth. And the weft will do the same thing, but in relation to the structure that's been set out by the warps.

Can you define the terms warp and weft?

The warps are the typically much longer threads that are measured and sorted in a very particular way as the basis for the wefts to be woven into. The warps are put under tension on the loom, depending on what kind of loom it is. It might be just a backstrap loom where the points of tension are your body. The warps span one point of tension to another so that they're taut. The fact that they’re taut means they can be opened and closed in order to pass the weft through. And then the weft is beaten down into cloth. So the warps hold the weft, which is the fiber that goes back and forth across the warps.

You teach a class at Yale about the matrix, can you elaborate on this idea of about engineering the picture plane?

Weaving is a grid based system. I'm fascinated by how something more organic can get translated into this binary system that the loom requires. Everything is of equal importance in a grid. Even absence is something that's quantified and accounted for.

Getting involved in all of that pushed me to think about the painting surface as a more holistic space where everything is in that play. I've been teaching a visual thinking class where we are dealing with Gestalt theory, figure ground relationships, and questions of hierarchy, and how to invert those hierarchies. The grid has been a foundational way into thinking about the equivalence of everything.

How does weaving relate to your painting practice?

Thinking about the botanical paintings, one thing with weaving is that the density of the cloth that you're producing is such a critical feature. Getting really involved in structure and thinking about positive and negative being of equal importance to the overall effect made me regard the surface of a canvas similarly somehow. The plants that I have been excited to paint have certain sort of fibrous qualities to their long stems. Plants have been an easy subject to let me think about how the surface of a picture plane is subdivided and given different kinds of density. I think of those flower paintings as very abstract in that sense, in some way they're really about the engineering of the picture plane.

Weaving stands for something different, politically, to me, than painting—I see it as being kind of in opposition with painting. It's silly to assign them genders, but the craft of weaving was right under my nose as a kid, and yet, no one ever equated my interest in being an artist with my grandmother's incredible skill set in weaving. I think painting has this authority that's bound up with a very patriarchal history and Western white history. Textile arts from so many cultures are completely mind-blowing and so incredible, but they have been sidelined in art history. Historically, weaving has such a different status than painting—that is significant content for me to play with in how I relate to the craft.

And what about the practice of painting the cloth?

I've painted both the warp and the weft at different times.

Is there a tradition of people doing that? Or is that something that you arrived on?

Oh no—there are many traditions. This process of painting the warps has different names in different cultures, but I think the one people are probably most familiar with is ikat from Indonesia. Usually it's not painted directly on to the warps when they're on the loom. Typically what happens is some system for masking off areas of the warp is being used so that the entire batch of threads can be immersion dyed, but parts of them are masked, maybe then dyed in a different color.

We call it painted warp because it's about color being applied irregularly on those warp threads, but I think in most cases it's done through a dyeing process rather than through a direct application of paint onto the warps.

Were you thinking about other artists painting on the threads when you embarked on your weavings?

No, and I still only know a handful of artists doing it. Usually a kind of organic image is imparted through tapestry weaving, where the color changes are happening because of discontinuous wefts. Instead of the weft going all the way across, it will come to a point where there's some kind of a contour and it interlocks with a different weft. So all of a sudden you have two different colors in the weave, and in these very complex, beautiful tapestries you have many different wefts and they're all hanging down from the weaving as you're working.

Tell us more about Jämtlands Giverny, which is one of your earlier woven works.

My approach to planning a weaving is often motivated by its limitations. I've been interested in how the constraints of the grid system challenged me to think about painting effects.

Weaving involves interlacing the warp and weft and the interaction of color is fascinating. You can see that in Jämtlands Giverny. The warps have a lot of paint on them, but how they appear ultimately is contingent on what's woven into them. There's an area that looks really light, more like pastel, with a lot more white in it. And that's just because it's woven with a lighter colored weft thread. So the painting that's on these threads is consistent, but you can see how it appears different depending on what's woven into it.

In this piece in particular, I wanted to make an all over type of composition. There’s no primary figure or subject that is foregrounded against some sort of negative space, but there's a kind of equilibrium, a democracy of forms that appear in it. There's no figure-ground relationship.

And coming back to that warp/weft problem with color, if you can see both of them, then there's this dialectical relationship between them. But a lot of traditional tapestry weaving only shows only the weft. So the warp is really just providing the structure that these wefts can coexist in.

I wanted some areas of very non-defuse color and was only able to do that in certain quantities throughout this bigger piece. So it's kind of a negotiation between what can be done with a painted warp and then how to add accents that are more weft faced tapestry. That's the technical background.

Monet's gardens where he lived in Giverny, France, were a major source of inspiration for him. Were you thinking of Monet when you made this piece?

This piece was made for a show that was celebrating a residency in the north of Sweden. I was invited to choose a piece to put in the show related to my time at that residency. And it was way up in the north, really immersion in the woods and the heather, the bogs. So I wanted to make a landscape that didn't have any figures, that was just all about the ground of the woods there. It's called Jämtlands Giverny because I always think of those Monet waterlilies as an archetypal example of an all over painting where you don't even have a horizon line. It's still a landscape, but it's sort of all surface.

Was this your first large-scale piece on the loom? And can you explain the pops of color that exist within the fields of greens and browns and neutral tones?

I had been doing a lot of different kinds of experiments with this painting process. This piece was unusual in the sense that it is an all-over, more abstract piece. Those little flecks of color are brought in through a different colored weft. And in preparing the warps, I knew that I needed to reserve certain areas that were unpainted because in this type of structure, the weft is never occluding the warp. A lot of it has green painted onto it, but if I knew that I wanted to have these flecks of red, I didn't paint green there because that would neutralize in a woven mix with green and red.

You mentioned there is a lot of preparation in embarking on a weaving project. How did that work for this piece?

This piece had the least pre-planning of anything I've woven because usually I am working with some kind of a figure. The loom itself is maybe 52 inches wide, and the warps that I'm able to work with, I can't do much wider than 30 inches. I have made many large pieces that are comprised of multiple panels that have to be sewn together. So this one has four or five, but usually I need to make a very large one-to-one drawing. I make the whole image at the same size that weaving will eventually be and then I cut that into wide bands. I register these bands underneath the warps in order to use them as a guide. So usually I'm working with some kind of a template that gets cut up into lots of small pieces.

For this piece, I knew that I wanted to make a field of many greens that would feel as diverse as the range of greens in a landscape. I wanted to effect some relationship to naturalism in the color and then leave certain spaces where I could bring in colors that were not green. I had to reserve areas that didn't have that color on them because the warps, in this case, will show up in the weave. I made a painting that laid out these terms of a green field with flecks of color. When I applied the green to the warps, I tried to leave areas open to put in those flecks. But it did happen fairly improvisationally in the weave where, when I would get to an open area, I would add a different color paint just in that particular place and then weave a brighter color into it.

Tell us about inheriting your grandmother's loom.

I put it together with the help of an assistant. It's a very old loom, made in the 19th century. It is all wood joinery. There’s no hardware, you're just using a mallet to jam these pieces of wood into each other. It’s called a counter-march loom.

My grandmother's loom was shipped from Norway. My grandparents moved back to Norway when my grandfather retired from teaching Scandinavian studies in Wisconsin and so she took the big loom back there. When I received the loom and reassembled it, I realized that I had never actually been around it without her present. That was very emotional for me to suddenly resurrect this thing that was so connected to my grandmother and for her to have been gone for many years.