Margot
Becker

Through weaving, I perform textile metaphors and myths used throughout history and in the present to communicate human understanding of the world. Weavers are the ancestral timekeepers, the truth-tellers, and the tide holders. While these stories no longer offer a literal explanation for natural phenomena, they find new relevance in the Anthropocene.

My work is the visualization of a series of desires: that the web of this world could be affected by the action of an individual node. That a loom could control the rise of the ocean, the pulling in of an individual thread is directly related to the coming waves. The desire to perceive death and decay not as a loss, but as a reordering of molecules in the greater system of which we are already a part. The hope to control my own destiny once I understand that time is a human construct.

Patterns in textiles throughout history have drawn from the world around us to create motifs that celebrate and commemorate the environment. Decoration and embellishments carry human found patterns in the world around us, nullifying its chaos. My weavings are present-day iterations of the nature-textile. In this era of the sixth mass extinction, there is a new need for metaphor to aid in the mental processing of our current environmental state. How can myths assuage the feeling of foreboding that accompanies the attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible? Will these myths serve us in the end?