[traffic rumbling]
[gentle music]
- Diedrick Brackens: I have always been a tinkerer
and, like, loved to take things apart.
I had a frame loom when I was a tiny person,
and I spent a lot of time with it
and have always loved process,
but I honestly found weaving by accident.
I decided to sign up for this summer class
of textile and weaving.
- Tristan Esmino: Morning. - Diedrick: Morning.
The first day I walked into the room,
I just was hooked to see the sunlight streaming in,
these perfect rows of looms, and just that materiality
of all of these different textures and colors of yarn.
It had me spellbound.
I mean, I think if I had a personal license plate,
it would say, "Dreamweaver." [chuckling]
[curious orchestral music]
[peaceful flute music]
[loom rattling]
I had an idea of what figurative things needed to look like.
Textiles that were figurative were often European tapestries,
which are highly realistic, very figural,
flora and fauna exploding out of the surfaces of them.
I had been looking at West African traditions of weaving,
which were almost entirely abstract.
As a queer Black person who is weaving, people are like,
"How does someone with all these identities
find their way to something even more niche?"
After maybe the third time someone was like,
"God, you're a unicorn."
And so thinking about the unicorn
as this exceptional, impossible creature,
I started to think about a self-portrait.
The unicorn kente
is one of the first leaps I took away from abstraction
because I needed so badly to weave this like, figural thing.
I had so much trepidation
about introducing figures to the work,
but I knew I needed to weave them.
The drawings that I use to make the figures
are based on my own body,
but I don't necessarily think of them as myself.
They're related to my experiences,
but they can be vehicles for people
to think about themselves and others in the world.
I've been really curious as I've been weaving figures,
how to continue to make the poses interesting and dynamic.
What ways the figures might flex or move
and convey those motions to get that solidity across
with these fragile, precious materials.
Natural fibers have helped us both lift things,
tear things down, move things.
That, like, single strand
is able to accomplish these great feats.
[shears snipping]
This is one of a series of works that will use the rope.
So in this case, it's just these two figures
sort of wrestling with each other.
Successive pieces will be more about pulling things down,
like structures, and raising things up, like tents.
So how humans have used string and rope
in both building and destroying things.
I work in panels in part
because of the constraints of the loom.
When I work in the panel,
I can create an image that I wouldn't otherwise be able to
if I was working in just one piece.
But this I think needs to go up to like, here.
- Tristan: Okay.
Diedrick has a plan, but he also has this leeway
of, like, letting the material kind of do its own thing.
A lot of back and forth between his sketches,
and then what's happening on the loom
and his spontaneous additions to the image.
- I mean, I'll be able to leave that.
- In the interaction
between the human and the, like, mechanical of the loom,
there's inevitable fallout from the framework,
and we have to constantly be reacting to that.
[shuttle rattling]
[loom clacking]
- Once I sit down at the loom, it is, I don't know.
I feel like I kind of, like, fall into it.
[peaceful flute music]
I often tell people it's like time travel
or taking a long road trip,
like you just kind of, like you--
It feels like mentally, I go somewhere else.
[peaceful flute music]
It is a full-body experience.
You use your legs and your arms and the rhythm
of kind of pushing yarn backwards and forward.
It just, it's meditative.
[shuttle rattling]
The weaving techniques are mostly double weave.
Double weave pickup.
I also do a lot of strip weaving
and sewing things together to create larger compositions.
The figure is woven in a supplemental warp and weft,
so inside the structure of the cloth,
there are these additional threads
that I can call up at will.
And what they do is essentially hold the black yarn
to the surface of the cloth wherever I want,
as opposed to having to take the thread from end to end.
That can kind of put it in place,
almost like a woven embroidery.
So it's two weaving techniques
kind of collapsed on top of each other.
I think about the double weave.
I can kind of push the figure into the foreground
or have a horizon line,
or puts shapes in the sky or in the ground
by having those two layers.
So it's color, image, and depth, I think, for me.
* La da da, la da,
* La da da
My grandmother taught me to sew when I was young,
so I was always tinkering with these materials.
I spent a lot of summers with my grandmother.
She lives in the same house
that I grew up going to in Mexia, Texas.
Mexia is like a tiny town.
It's a place where most everyone knows everyone.
I mean, I think of myself as, you know,
a child of this place.
In 1981 in Lake Mexia, during a Juneteenth celebration,
three young men were drowned in police custody.
They were being transported across the lake,
handcuffed in a boat that capsized.
They were Steven Booker, Carl Baker, and Anthony Freeman.
I think it's really shaped who I am
and how I think about the world, to be from that place.
The catfish is a symbol that I work with a lot,
and for me, it's become a symbol of the American South,
and I've used it as a way to think about death,
about transformation,
about this creature that sort of can be above and below.
[traffic rumbling]
- Holly Jerger: The exhibition is a survey
of Diedrick's use of the catfish motif
in his poetry and weavings.
Diedrick's work illustrates
where someone who is deeply steeped
in the history and the techniques of weaving
can use them to create
very contemporary, relevant narratives.
The poems and the weavings are parallel practices
that feed one another.
- Fish prayers are easy to answer.
And the days pass quiet, so I sleep.
Sometimes I dream of boys.
They fall and flap, breaking open my glassy eye.
They dance down deep into my belly,
where I can't cry them out.
I try and fill their chests with, "Breathe! God! Brother!"
I don't know the words for save or swim.
My catfish wreath them, suits of clouds.
[audience applauds]
I started to think about the catfish
as a way to signify this loss,
to think about the energy of these young men
being transmuted,
thinking about how could I make the catfish special?
How could I raise it up?
How could I think about it as something worth weaving?
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I started thinking about how to make textiles sculptural
and inherent in basketry as form.
I made a series of baskets
and took them out into the natural environment
to think about them as another means of navigating the world
or escaping.
The photographs allowed me
to extend these narratives in visual ways
that the textiles sometimes have to forego.
I've just been in the studio,
dreaming of what I want the work to do,
how I want it to grow and change,
and just, like, further exploring
what mastery of this medium is.
I think I return to that class of textile and weaving.
I return to that room in my mind a lot,
and even now, it still feels like
the most romantic occupation that I could have chosen.
[chuckling]
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