In preparation for AIR 15's final exhibition, where artists will display the work created during the residency, we take a look back at AIR 14's final show, titled Way In/Way Out, at Textile Arts Center.
In Way In/ Way Out the artists draw from their shared histories and unique experiences to explore and imagine future possibilities and build alternate realities within our landscape. The cohort explored concepts around emotion, beauty, chaos, value, and protection, with heart and humor.
During their final exhibition we had the chance to sit down with some of the AIR 14 artists and learn a little bit more about their work. In this first blog post we’ll share what Hekima Hapa, Martina Cox, Madhura Nayak, and M.E. Guadalupe Rubi had to share about the passions and inspirations behind their practice.
Hekima Hapa
Hekima Hapa is a Fashion Designer, social entrepreneur, author and Founder of the 22 year sustainable independent fashion brand inspired by Africa and the people of its diaspora, Harriet’s Alter Ego also known as Harriet’s by Hekima. In 2013, she founded Black Girls Sew, a nonprofit organization committed to positively impacting the lives of youth and families through education in sewing, design and entrepreneurship. Hekima has been a recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Council Fund for the past 10 consecutive years and the Reduce, Reuse and Repair and Neighborhood Grant from Citizens Committee NYC. In 2022, Hapa teamed up with author and designer Lesley Ware to publish the nonprofit’s first book, “Black Girls Sew: Projects and Patterns to Stitch and Make Your Own".
Romina: Could you talk a little bit about the piece that you’re showing, this huge installation next to you, and the themes around it?
Hekima Hapa: So, what we see here is, I was told not to call it a doll, and I think I agree. I call it a guardian alien, I think that it’s out of this world. It’s been something that’s kind of inside of me, I think, always. I think it’s always existed and it’s made its appearance here at TAC. It is so many parts of the things I wanted to learn. When we talked about a final project, I thought I wanted to do doll making, but I don’t think traditionally now that I see it. They also say in the Caribbean and in the African diaspora, that it’s a moko jumbie, which means it’s filled with spirit. It’s used in Carnival and so very much not a doll when we say it, but built with some of the same components. In this particular piece, I tried to express the quilting that my mom’s sisters made as children that lined our homes. It was filled with textiles. There’s also weaving that I feel like I got infused with at TAC. Like, I was never, ever interested in weaving before coming to this space. But I think that it creeps its way into your practice here because it’s so prevalent, and I’m glad it did. In my fashion design, I’ve always used denim heavily as well as Ankara prints. I am kind of divorcing Ankara in a certain kind of way. It's changed a lot since I started using it, it’s changed in meaning, and I’m leaning more towards sustainable fashion, so the denim is kind of replacing that in thought. The patchwork is there, I’ve always been taught to use everything, so you see that this doll is made of all recycled denim jeans that I bought for a dollar, or as my daughter was telling everybody last night, that I’ve also taken from their closets. But yeah, so, here she is!
Romina: And now you're sharing textile practices with the nonprofit.
Hekima: Absolutely. I think that this camp was one of the best camps that we had because I grew so much as an artist over this last year. And the things that I learned here, I was able to then turn around and teach the children. One of the things that I shared when I had my interview to become part of TAC was that teaching me is like teaching an entire community. Because TAC is here and it's in Park Slope and people have certain resources, that's amazing that you can come and you can pay whatever the classes cost and you have access. But I think in the community in which I live and work, people don't have it. You know? They are worried about groceries, so they can't worry about their child getting certain skills. During the summer, summer camp is not a thing. I've never gone to summer camp in my life. That wasn't a thing as a child. We had a certain amount of resources. And I think that there are children who grow up in this city in the same way. And what I'm setting out to do is kind of change that narrative. The more money I can gather from other communities and the more resources and bring it back and pour it into these communities that don't have, like that's my work. That's what's important. So I was able to do that on a small scale to share that gift with 25 people. The things that I gathered here, we were able to take. Everybody at TAC was just so wonderful about sharing their skills with me and my children while we were here. Classes that I didn't take, people would just share and say, look, I have an indigo bat. Come, dip your hands in and show me things that they didn't have to. And so experiencing community in a different way and being able to go back and take that community is really, really powerful.
Romina: I'm also curious about your background as a fashion designer and creating things that are meant to be used in comparison to this huge installation and how you see it existing in relation to the audience.
Hekima: I think for me, even in the art that I create, when I think about doing quilting and I think about clothing, I want the things that I make to be consumed. I want a quilt not to hang on a wall. I want it to be an heirloom where you value it because I put 14 hours in it, right? I want it to be given though. I would see it more as a gift. Like I would like it to be given as a wedding present and then people keep it and covet it and you know, it's on your bed and you think about your honeymoon or whatever way you use it, but I want it to be used. I don't want it to sit on a wall and you know, gather dust. I want it to be consumed. I want it to be worn and washed, and mend it like this. I think that that's the spirit that's infusing what it is. I think that that's where the energy comes from, that I was surrounded by textile, but we consumed them. My mom's sisters made quilts, and they sent her parts of quilts, and she finished the quilts, and she shared them with a whole community of people. And so I would like to see my art used in that way. I think it's important.
Martina Cox
Martina Cox is an artist based out of New York City. After graduating from the Cooper Union in 2018, Martina founded her eponymous clothing label, selling one-off garments made to order as a way to uphold slow fashion values. Since closing her business in 2021, Martina has continued to make work about fashion history and craft through Sculpture, Drawing and Performance. She has shown at Alyssa Davis Gallery (Providence), LVL3 (Chicago), Jack Chiles Gallery (New York) and hosts a monthly mending club that addresses ways we can heal relationships with objects we often deem as disposable.
Romina: Can you talk about the pieces that you’re exhibiting at TAC?
Martina Cox: Yes, absolutely. So I know that at first maybe there seems to be a bit of disconnect between my old window garments and the pieces that I’m showing here, but I think that they’re constantly in conversation with each other, and specifically with these pieces, I feel I almost turned the time dial back like four or five decades. I’ve been really invested the past year in studying fashion from the end of the 19th century, so specifically the 1870s to 1890s. Those were the years that I’m super invested and fascinated in, that really reached horizontal extremes. So, a bustle is a 19th-century undergarment. It was worn tied around your waist and worn on your backside like a tail. It would help create the silhouette that the 1800s are so famous for. It’s just like this crazy unrealistic sort of silhouette with the very constricted torso and then this huge backside which I feel like is still relevant today, just in terms of body mod. So, I love bustles. I think they’re super humorous in the same way that my window garments are humorous. So I started collecting them and I started collecting images of the insides of these bodices. I had never intended on drawing them, drawing is a new medium for me. I’ve always worked very much in creating the textiles or creating sculpture. And so, it was an extremely meditative transition. I think hand stitching is very meditative in a similar way. And so the insides of these bodices are really special to me. I feel like they tell so much more of a story than the outside of the garment in the same way that when you see embroidery looking at the back of the embroidery, you see so much character, you see so much story told in mistakes that were covered up or when someone ran out of a color. And so I feel similarly about the insides of the bodice and I also love that they’re called guts. In costume design, the inside of bodices and jackets are called the guts of the garment. I view these bodices as containers for these torsos that have, for basically centuries, been seen as malleable. So I feel like there’s a lot to speak on when looking at the insides of these. There’s also thinking on labor and who saw the inside of that garment is probably only two or three people ever. So it almost feels weird, it feels crazy to display something that maybe was so private and so intimate for centuries.
Romina: So you talked about your background as a sculptor, and the interesting fact about these bodices being three-dimensional. Could you refer to the process of approaching drawing being a bidimensional technique, and if it changed something in your practice?
Martina: Yeah, I mean, I think implementing the hand stitching into the drawings themselves, it's so funny because I have to, like, physically... turn the paper around over and over for each stitch. So I'm actually handling it. It becomes so three-dimensional because I need physical space wherever I'm drawing to be able to turn this paper around for each time I put the needle through. I flip it back around. And so I love that it almost takes on that sculpt…. like it's a piece of paper, but it's flopping around everywhere, and it is taking up space no matter where I'm working.
I do think that is an interesting product of my practice that just occurred. But I think working two dimensionally seemed like a natural progression because I was so interested in how abstracted the insides of these garments look. So these bodices are all from the 19th century and they're speaking a very different language than contemporary clothing. They're cut from like 30 pattern pieces. They're constructed in a way that's very different from how fast fashion is constructed. So when you look at the insides of these jackets, it's almost like abstract because it's so, you don't really understand what you're… I do understand what I'm looking at when I see it, but maybe not everyone understands what they're looking at when they see the insides of these.
And so I thought, kind of flattening the image through drawing. And I think even the added element of using colored pencils when it looks like they're paintings, it's just slowly trying to remove it step by step from its original sculptural source. And I was even thinking of presenting some of them upside down, so that the top of the jacket was… But that's not the case with these. There's one drawing I made so far that's very successful in that way. And I'll be presenting it eventually that way. But yeah, just like taking step by step to really flatten and abstract and sort of remove it from what I see when I look at it maybe.
Romina: I'm also curious, you mentioned the relation to labor and the amount of labor these garments involved. And now you also referenced the industrialization era and how maybe, and correct me if I'm wrong, handwork has been reduced.
Martina: Yeah, absolutely.
Romina: How do you approach that in your work?
Martina: I think there's a parallel between that time and today with fast fashion. There were so many similar protests, and there were so many similar pushbacks against the change in the way that not just clothing was made, but things were made in general. I know there was in Great Britain, like the Luddites, is that the term? They're the people that...
I'm not sure. Okay, I hope it's Luddite.
I don't know.
They're like against... industrialization and like progression and you know, so there were people that were coming in and destroying the like large scale looms you know, because Britain was industrializing their textile industry and there were people that were, like, sentenced to death for going in and trying to, like, stop this progress.
And so, like, again, like, government starting to value the textile production and the industrialization over like human life by putting a death penalty on trying to interfere with it. That was very extreme. I don't know where that example was supposed to go. But I guess something that I think about sometimes and because I guess it's very extreme at the same time fast fashion is really not that far off. I mean it's not like there's death penalties for like interfering with it but at the same time people are constantly just being exposed to fatal working situations without question or like there's just so, we're so far removed from it that most people don't think about that when they're purchasing their clothes. So I feel like, yeah, that's a good transition into just, yeah, like this labor and this time and this handiwork that you see.
I feel like people would pass down their textiles from like generation to generation. It would be innate in like the way that everyone operated because textile production was so labor intensive. You cherish them. I mean, people's bedding and linens were like second on the will when an estate was getting passed down because it was the most prized possession. And I guess having that connection with your objects is just not as common today. We see everything as super accessible and super disposable, which has its plus sides, but it's also like, yeah, we literally see everything as disposable, almost everything. And so that's why I feel like a good segue into my mending club. I feel like mending club is starting to help people take baby steps and start to form a relationship with their objects, even if it's just embroidering a tiny little flower over a whole of a garment, all of a sudden a relationship is formed.
So I feel like Even though this work might not be totally, like, visibly connected to Mending Club, I think it's actually extremely, like, in conversation with hosting Darn It, the Mending Club.
Madhura Nayak
Madhura Nayak’s art practice is multi-disciplinary with a focus on textiles as a medium. She aims to push the boundaries of a conventional and very popular resist dye process called tie and dye. Using techniques of ‘Bandhani’ from India and ’Shibori’ from Japan, she developed her own unique method she calls- 'Bandhori' which she looks forward to patenting. With interest rooted deep in the textile world, she also continues to create art using any medium necessary while exploring all the realms of creative textile processes. She was awarded a Masters in Fine Arts from the Lasalle College of the Arts Singapore in the year 2012. Madhura is currently pursuing her artist-in-residence with the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, New York.
That actually got me hooked onto experimentation. I realized there's just so much more to do within the textile domain, and we only look at textiles as wearables and something to use, whereas we don't celebrate textiles enough as just objects within themselves. I feel like the thread itself represents life. There's this thread of life that binds us all, it connects us all. There's just so many common things that we do that we just take for granted. We don't even think about: I'm breathing and so are you. It's the most equalizing thing. It's like we all have the same sky over our heads. So these are some things that dawned on me as I was working with textiles.
Madhura: That is what this is about. I was also missing my daily walks in the park. And Singapore, being the weather that it has, it has something that's called epiphytes that grow on the trees naturally, which are found in rainforests. And if you look at this piece here… what I'm trying to do is create this epiphyte. It's almost like my own artwork piece has a presence of its own. And then there's this epiphyte that's growing over it. And epiphytes are such that they do not, they're not parasitic. So they grow on their own. They don't affect the host tree. And it's just, I feel that that symbiotic relationship that they have visually, it's very attractive to me. And that was one of the things I missed.
So I think, which is why visually I've put these epiphytes in my works, like even the Rakhi's epiphytes in my work here. I've also used indigo everywhere, if you see, because I feel like indigo is one of the few dyes that has a diversity. Whatever little I've learned about indigo after coming to TAC, speaking to so many people who are experts in indigo dyeing, I've realized that I still have to study this, but every continent has its own set of plants that we use to derive indigo from. And I feel that speaks so much about us, culturally as people, because we all eat the same food, you know, we wear the same materials, but then we have our own costumes, we have our own cuisines, and it's something similar with indigo, and that's why I feel like it ties in very well with my work right now.
And these pieces up here, I wanted this space to evoke the same feeling that I feel when I go into some of my favorite spots in the park. So I wanted the person to feel a sense of serenity. Looking up, it's almost like a sky because it's blue, but then it's also got all these epiphyte kinds of forms that are coming down. And you just look at the beauty and say, oh my God, this is something very different. And you just enjoy the visual. state of being in that space and it kind of gets your mind off your daily stresses so that is what this entire installation is about.
Romina: Do you want to tell us about the specific techniques that we're seeing and the difference of it and the process that it involves? And if you can, I will also enjoy hearing you speaking about your routine with your loom because I know there was also a ritual involved in that.
Madhura: Yes. Okay, let's start with the loom because this is something that I have seen my family members practice. I've seen... other people within the community practice, that whenever you get a machine that's going to be a medium to produce something that you have in mind, it's almost like giving that machine the same respect you would give to a human being because it is going to do a certain amount of work for you. So which is why I have... We have this ritual for everything at home as well, that when we have a new machine, we will always... have the small ceremony again, you know, using the lamp to, like, it's almost like drawing circles around it. By invoking that fire, you're invoking purity. And then by offering Hali and Kumkum, we are basically invoking the gods to bless that machine so that it does the work that we intend it to do for us. So that is about the ritual for the loom that I had here. My connection to the loom is, like I said, because I feel like the warp is what we are given, handed down by life. When I'm working on the loom, I feel like I am just replicating my life on that loom. So it means a lot to me to work on the loom. And it's almost like it has its own spirit. And it supports me in so many ways. Like there are times when you're struggling with what you're working on, and you feel, oh my God, am I going to damage the loom? But that loom kind of, it's almost like the loom says, no, I'll do my bit, you know. It allows you to push and pull and, you know, not give it the gentle treatment that you expect to be giving. So I feel that the machine is also, it has a life of its own. And my weavings, when they come, they've all come out of that, the ones that have come out of that loom, I feel so blessed that I was able to complete them on that loom. It has stayed with me and basically supported me through my journey to produce what I was intending on producing.
Performance
M.E. Guadalupe Rubi
M.E. Guadalupe Rubi is a maker, a teaching artist, rogue taxidermist, professional costume maker, and fiber artist of Latin and Wabanaki descent. Rubi's artistic practice is a meditation on memory: the stories we have inherited and the stories we create to remember. Past residencies and Fellowships include the NARS Satellite Residency on Governors Island, Penland School of Craft, Triple 9 Arts, the Roundabout Theatre, Anhklave Fellowship, and the John C. Campbell Folk School Traditional Fiber Craft Mentorship. She has exhibited at the Queens Botanical Garden, CultureLab LIC, Canvas Gallery, and the American Folk Art Museum.
Romina: Could you describe for us a little bit of your custom work? Because right now we are seeing a piece that I could relate to it. Is it similar? Has it evolved? And how?
M.E.: Yeah, absolutely. Any of the pieces in particular? Or is it just in general? Okay. So a lot of times I'm inspired to make a piece based on the bone fragment that I find. I have bought bone fragments from hunters, from ranchers, from forensic biologists, what have you… and I start there. Because to me, inherently, it's about honoring the bone fragment. And not all the pieces on the wall are bone fragments, but that's primarily how I approach it, where I get something and then riff off of that piece, where that's the beginning.
And for pieces that aren't... have any bones in them, like my red prick nerve. Like, I made that piece in a moment of frustration. So I looked up what a brain neuron looked like, and then copied it, made a sculptural form for it, and thought it would be inherently funny to call a piece “prick nerve”, because too dry felt, you have to prick something. So it's the idea of making a joke out of frustration, because it's a red nerve that I made. So I'd like to think that there's also a little bit of comedy in all of the work. Or at the very least to have a good sense of humor. Because I think inherently to talk about the big topics, to talk about death, to talk about life, I think you have to do so with grace and with a little sense of humor. Otherwise it's way too macabre for anyone's good. And very much I started making work as a way to find joy in suffering. And I think with emphasis on a playful approach to death, that I would hope that a viewer would find a similar kind of reverence and comfort from that.
Romina: Considering that, do you see your pieces existing in spaces that are not, let's say, art institutions?
M.E.: Oh, that's a good question. I do. I think I do is the short answer. The long answer is I think as a consequence of working many different kinds of craft jobs that I feel very comfortable moving through many different spaces. So I do see the work. as an extension of me maybe, moving through many different places, whether that be institutional, or a children's museum, or my apartment, which most of this stuff lives on a daily basis. My living room is very funny looking. So yes, I see the work existing in many places because I also think that myself as an artist, I think of myself as very adaptable.
Romina: You opened the path perfectly for my next question. I read on TAC’s story about your work that spirituality plays a role in it. Could you tell us how?
M.E.: Yeah, absolutely. So I think spirituality means many things for different people. It feels like a good word for me to use because I think I move through the world with an understanding that this is not the only thing going on. And I think I was raised Catholic, and I think inherently the fundamental beliefs that this isn't, there's more to come, and there's greater things to come, I think fuels how I approach art, because it's how I'm approaching death. So there's a great book called Where... Women That Run With The Wolves, which is a mix of Jungian philosophy and beautiful folk tales from around the world. And I think that book does a really, really wonderful job of explaining and maybe making beautiful connections to this idea that spirituality and feminine divinity is interconnected with creation and creating. So I feel like a lot of my work is honoring feminine craft. And I think as a costume maker, as being for many years in costume shops with other women, that it gives me a lot of joy to almost reclaim the feminine narrative, reclaim the indigenous narrative by making work that I feel... that I hope other people are inspired by when they see it. You know, like I make a big joke that I'm just like a spinster because that used to be a slur word for young women that spun wool. And it's kind of like this reclaiming of craft, which I think is actually a really interesting thing that's happening right now in fine art. It's a huge explosion of fiber art right now, which is... was discriminated against for many years as just craft, and then we have that big conversation between art versus craft, and thankfully that line distinguish… and distinguishing them two is getting narrower. So to answer your question, I think what moves me and my spirituality I hope you can see in the work, but I don't think you have to necessarily be spiritual to find comfort in it. I think that's what's so inherent about spirituality is I think it's like a good meal. You don't need to know what's in the meal to know that you've enjoyed it. To me, nature and spirituality are very interconnected. So I'm coming from a much more indigenous understanding of creation is nature and God is nature.
So the most beautiful artist is, excuse me, the most beautiful art is nature. So why wouldn't I want to evoke that in my work. So that's why I often go back to botanicals and flora and fauna and drawing a closest connection to which even my botanicals look a little creature-like, which is meant to be a little funny, but it's also meant to evoke that anything from the earth is life-giving. So yes, I hope that's clear when looking at the pieces.