Isa Rodrigues is a textile artist, fabricator, and educator living between Brooklyn, New York, and her hometown Lagos, Portugal. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Art and Design, the Cooper Hewitt Museum, Ace Hotel Brooklyn, Heirloom Brooklyn, and the Textile Arts Center. Isa is a founding team member of the Textile Arts Center (TAC), where she has worked as Co-Executive Director, and founded the project Sewing Seeds, a project that organized natural dye gardens in empty lots and community gardens in Brooklyn. She runs a textile fabrication business, 505 Textiles, through which she has created work for clients such as Altuzarra, Gabriela Hearst, Ace Hotel, M.Patmos, and Thompson Street Studio, amongst others. She teaches textile materiality, weaving, natural dyeing, and other surface design techniques at TAC, Ox-Bow, Rhode Island School of Art, and Pratt Institute.
“My work explores the connection between textiles and memory, often inspired by our emotional response to the elements, natural phenomena, and landscape. Working with the natural world as both a material source and co-creator, I investigate how textile processes and materiality can become tools to capture, process, and archive our embodied experiences, like a material-memory. I’m also interested in community-centered spaces and systems of making and sharing knowledge, and education as a means to preserve material culture.
Growing up in a fishing town in the South of Portugal, and having always lived by the water, I’m forever inspired by human’s fascination and interdependence with the ocean; and how it manifests as feelings of wonder, nostalgia, renewal, healing, and fear. While in residency at TAC WIP, I plan to continue expanding on this material research of ocean’s related phenomena, paraphernalia, and rituals.”
During her WIP residency Isa will host nets & networks, a workshop exploring nets as both practical and metaphorical structures for holding, sharing, and communicating. The participants will look into historical and contemporary net-making techniques and uses, and collaboratively learn how to create simple net structures using thread. No experience required, all ages welcome. Stay tuned for more info!