Action in Artwork — On backstrap weaving

I've been in Korea the last few months, doing something a bit different. For five years now I've been obsessed with backstrap weaving — one of the earliest forms of weaving, found in most parts of the world. Korea has its own traditional backstrap technique, and I'd been trying to learn it for years, but I couldn't find anyone in this hemisphere who knew how.

My husband is Mexican American, and we spend a lot of time in southern Mexico. My friends there said, why don't you learn Maya backstrap weaving. There are so many similarities, it's all over the world. So five years ago I started learning from a Mayan-Mexican weaver, a little confused at first: why am I learning the Maya version? It took me a long time to finally find people in Korea who still do it, especially with a plant called mosi: a ramie plant, a 1,500-year-old tradition that's vanishing fast. I connected with a group of women who still practice, and learned from them these past few months. I didn't realize it at the time, but I'm the first international person ever to learn this traditional weaving in Korea.

Now I'm back with this new knowledge, but I don't want to be a traditional mosi weaver. So how do I practice it from here? Some of the links I'm making are really interesting. The technique I learned in Mexico, from my teacher Marcela Gómez Díaz, comes from a community known for complicated brocade. We know Korean mosi weaving once used brocade too, because it's been written about, but no pieces survived, no documents. It was a very long time ago. So now I'm trying to bring brocade into the mosi, to make that link again.

I'm also working with Vicky Lowe, an Indigenous Mexican American weaver in Utah, and we're starting backstrap weaving workshops in Chicago and Utah. The technique is everywhere in the world, but people don't know how to do it and don't have access to it. And it's so similar everywhere. One of those mysteries that seems to have appeared in different places without any known connection. That's how the story goes, anyway; I don't know how accurate it is. But it's thousands of years old: Mayan backstrap weaving goes back 3,000-plus years, Korean mosi weaving 1,500-plus.

In art schools, the weaving that's taught — the floor loom, the jacquard loom — traces back to the Industrial Revolution and is very European, very white-centered. But across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, backstrap weaving connects to so many of our cultures, and a lot of people have lost that connection. So this fall we're starting workshops to teach it. It's going to spread.

There's so much activism in cultural heritage. Through my relationship with Chiapas and my weaving friends there, I see how fast it's disappearing. In Korea, too — one of the national treasure artists told me that within ten years, 90% of this knowledge will be gone, because the practitioners are all 70 or 80 and no young people are learning. It's the same in Mexico, even with many more people still practicing. In these places I see how much one person can matter to passing knowledge on. Sometimes it doesn't work. We'll see, in the long run, but these ancient knowledges don't sit easily with capitalism, and so they're vanishing. How do we hold on to them? How do we share them, transmit them, build on them?

And it's deeply community-based. There's nothing in textiles you can do alone, especially weaving, and these traditional practices, least of all. In most parts of the world it's groups of women, low-income women, whole communities of women. I keep coming back to the same thought: there's nothing in this work that isn't political, that isn't about activism.