hands

I don’t see my family anymore since I’m spending all my time at school, and when I am at home and not asleep in my bed, I’m working. Focusing on this fact, I decided that the subject of this portrait would be me, more specifically, my hands. Since I work with hands for the majority of my day and that is what I’m seeing, this is what my concept revolves around.

Compositionally, my hands are posed dynamically, floating on the warp threads of the upper middle part of the tapestry. The mood I’m aiming for is readiness: readiness to start working on whatever it is that I need to do. I left the warp threads bare, to symbolize my progression of work on this tapestry. I pulled a little tightly on the weft threads around the tips of the fingers, so that it looks as if the hands are pulling on the warp threads, looking like they are actually in the act of weaving. In essence, during the process, my hands are on a tapestry loom working on my hands on tapestry loom.

I made a separate loom for my piece, so that the tapestry can remain “on-loom”, while still being completely finished. I used an empty canvas frame, and ended up with a really natural look, which I think works really well.

My concern at the beginning of the project was - how would I go about weaving something in the middle of a loom without having weft threads underneath to support the shape on top? When creating the circle shape in the sample tapestry, we learned that the bottom half of the circle-outline/background should be completed before weaving the interior circle, so that there would be some support for it when it was beaten. That technique was totally scrapped here. What I ended up doing was creating the bottom outline of my hands using knots. One long string of yarn was used, and I knotted that string on each consecutive warp thread, on any part that needed support. This process was repeated two or three times back and forth (two or three rows of knotted lines) so that there could be added stability.

Another concern of mine was figural. Would my hands end up looking like hands? I was using a weird knotting technique that I had to figure out for myself, and this was a new thing for me – creating a non-geometric shape. Would it come across as a pair of hands or just a patch of neutral browns?

If I were to develop this piece, I would probably make it life size. I thought of placing the hands sideways so I could make it bigger, but the warp threads would run left to right when the portrait was oriented correctly, which would not be cohesive with my concept at all.

Overall, I think I conveyed my concept successfully. The hands look like hands, and the float ambiguously in the middle of the tapestry without slipping all over the place. At home, this is what I see until I fall asleep. I don’t see my family anymore on the weekdays since I’m spending all my time at school. So this is why I used my own hands as the subject of the tapestry, revolving around the concept of “Home”.