My weaving practice is an act of searching for forms that don’t exist yet. My baskets are based on mathematical rules, but organic in form, near-life but not alive, referencing living matter in color and form while resisting any specific taxonomy. The colors that I use are often inspired by meat, organs, and bone, but the material still holds onto its identity as a painted surface. The triaxial weave allows me to work impulsively while within a structure with strict rules, exploring and finding form as I go. For materials, I forage from the past decades of paintings and monoprints that grow like weeds in the corners of my studio. I deconstruct these older works and re-form them into vessel-paintings.
More recently, I have been playing with ways to show off and reveal the structure of the mad weave, treating the basket as if it is an anatomical diagram in a biology classroom—an object that tells a story about itself. This line of inquiry has led me to experiment with activating the intersections (or pores) of the basket with hairs and spines, as well as drawing on the “skin” to demonstrate the relationship between different types of triaxial plaits.
Website: bethanystrohm.com