-/-/- Artist Statement -/-/-
“Through physical motions and conceptual notions of weaving, I explore unweaving.”
-/-/- a personal and collective unweaving -/-/-
THE WEAVE .. the fabric of our identities comprises numerous strands of fibers, complete in their own right, that work in concert to hold each other together. The warp, foundational. The weft, moving through that foundation.
Just as weaving cloth requires coordinated effort and repetitive action over time, unweaving must happen slowly and deliberately. Remove a row of weft and the fabric remains intact. Cut a foundational warp or remove several at a time and the whole endures, even if altered.
Unlike unraveling knitting, where one missed loop or one snip of the yarn unravels the whole completely, the weave has more potential resilience.
So, what does it mean to unweave? How long might it take to simply recognize and identify the fibers of our foundation? How do we embrace an ongoing practice of UNWEAVING without experiencing complete catastrophe? How do we dismantle enough to create breathing space to envision a new expression of ourselves … and society?
Artist Statement
A temporary, outdoor, public art sculptural installation …
UNWEAVING explores the ways tradition, culture, communities, and individuals are unwoven when we are disconnected from our foundation of ancestral history (ie.when we don’t know our stories or when truths are suppressed or not acknowledged.) A different unweaving can loosen us from perpetuating unconscious pattern behaviors, make sense of our position in the larger social fabric, and enable reweaving a more honest and equitable future.
The four structures stand in a partial circle on a pad of grass at the heart of Sister Cities Park, each honoring a family member who lived through the Karelian Red Exodus of the 1930s – a little-known period that saw nearly 6,000 Finnish Americans leave communities in the Lake Superior region to go to Karelia, Russia to help build a utopian Finnish-speaking society that never came to fruition. Inspired by the science of epigenetics and cultural knowledge of ancestral memory, I bring to light a suppressed story within my own bloodline.
The yellow structures exist as armatures for the woven rag-rug tapestries that are visibly frayed and disconnected from the full family fabric. The hanging strips of weft come to define the space within the structure as both a sheltered and exposed place for contemplation on one’s own history and lineage within the context of epigenetics, which suggests that lived experiences can alter the expression of genes in future generations.
How has the suppression of ancestral stories impacted our understanding of ourselves, of the places we live, and the communities of which we are a part? How has assimilation to a system built on white supremacy disconnected us from the longer & wider tapestry of heritage and our community? What does it take to face the hard things that our ancestors experienced and never spoke of? How does that threaten our understanding of current reality? How does facing these discomforts open up a new world of possibility?
Ultimately UNWEAVING is about creating space to question our histories and our very selves. What am I willing to hold and process in order to heal the burdens of our past? What are you willing to give-up in order to create a more just and equitable future? What are we willing to experience in order to learn how to see differently?
We can practice this difficult work from a foundation of hope for a better future.
Dive deeper into some of the overlapping influences of this project in the main sections of this website at the top of the website.
Questions for myself:
What would happen if I let go of binary labels like “good/bad” and “right/wrong” ?
What is keeping me from seeing all that I cannot see?
What happens if I let go of needing to be right?
Questions for your visit:
Are there any stories or secrets that were kept hidden in your family?
How have you unknowingly adapted your behavior or view of the world around that story or void?
What are you willing to reconsider about yourself in light of new information?
Considering space:
What is your ideal contemplative space?
Are you able to ask hard questions in your own mind?
Do you have a process for holding and then releasing difficult emotions?
This project is personal
Since burning-out in 2014, the sensation of unraveling that initially overcame me, transformed into a practice of more intentional unweaving.
Addressing the internalized forces that allowed me to push myself beyond my ability to recover, disoriented me physically and emotionally to the point of questioning my reality. Facing myself and my patterns in the context of societal pressures related to body-image within the beauty standard, feminism within the patriarchy, qualitative achievements within capitalism, being white in a mixed-race marriage and birthing multi-cultural boys intertwine within my consciousness and my subconscious.
Working personally through my art practice and with help of family, coaches, natural-paths, medical, mystic, and professional therapists and exploring epigenetics and ancestral memory, I understand that the reality of my experience resides within me. After years of seeking the source of my unsettling, it is only in the last year that I recognized the over-arching oppressive system of white supremacy as the continuous thread tying everything together.
UNWEAVING represents a physical manifestation of my personal seeking, a memorial to four of my ancestors, and an offering to the greater Duluth-Community in the midst of pandemic and social uprising for equality.
What stories do we tell ourselves while allowing others to be forgotten? How do experiences still find their way to us in our body-memory? How can we begin to remember in order to heal our interwoven societal wounds? I offer these structures as containers that support the deep personal and collective unweaving we must engage.
Thank you for taking time to engage this project.
Would you take a moment to share feedback on your visit? This will help me report back to the MN State Arts Board.
Tia Keobounpheng is a fiscal year 2020 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.