KinShip
“Kinship," combines commercially produced fabrics with images of nature intended to be used for hunting and other forms of modern-day “camouflage” with geometric, digitally produced embroideries that reference sacred geometry and other “spiritual” schematics.
While working and teaching in Southern Maryland I encounter an abundance of material like hunters shirting and other “camo” and “nature” print fabric in commercial fabric stores. These materials are a point of entry for considering the complex “kinships” that develop amongst communities that live and work together at the edges of rural spaces and how relationships to “natural” spaces intersect with parts of identity, especially gender and sexuality. In Staying With the Trouble, Donna Haraway states: “Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate… Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope... Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence.” In KinShip, I explore the material semiotics of these fabrics and other materials as a way to evoke the “thick co-presence” of American life under late capitalism and in the age of the anthropocene.