These images are part of a larger body of work centered on water and highlights the way water moves, transforms, and nourishes all of life in ways both seen and unseen. Water carves a valley, tributaries move organically across land, vapor rises quietly into the atmosphere– speaking to migration and flux while transcending the notion of fixed borders. Like the industrial, corporate, and imperial impositions through illusory line making across topographies, water is also vastly co-opted and commodified. This work subverts the predominant western cultural relationship with water, and is made with earth-based materials in an ancient medium— weaving.
Woven work was an early map, detailing sacred elements of a culture or region, and was a part of everyday life from the temple to the home. Weaving has also long been a metaphor for world-making, as myths from around the world describe picking up the tattered threads of a broken world and beginning to weave again. These handwoven works speak to water as an almost invisible yet profoundly interconnecting force, and as a sacred part of the commons. The work offers a subtle roadmap home, and offers us a reminder of our connection and reciprocity with the Earth. It is woven together with fine, hand-dyed linen thread.
Image 1–
Title: Tributary
Artist: Melody Joy Overstreet
Year Completed: 2019
Medium: handwoven linen, organic fermented indigo
Image 2–
Title: Undulation
Artist: Melody Joy Overstreet
Year Completed: 2019
Medium: handwoven linen, organic fermented indigo
Image 3–
Title: Gorge
Artist: Melody Joy Overstreet
Year Completed: 2019
Medium: handwoven linen, organic fermented indigo
Weblinks