About The Woven Climate Datascapes

I translate climate data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration into abstracted landscapes and waterscapes, materializing the data with plant-derived fibers and dyes and petrochemical-derived medical tubing and fishing line. These woven datascapes and coiled sculptures merge a practice of record keeping with a practice of grieving and merge an expression of scientific research with an expression of lived experience.

This project started in 2015 as an investigation of the mechanisms through which we come to understand climate crises, from data and journalistic narrative to embodied and affective experience. I viewed the original datascapes as a respectful critique of data and data visualization. Data is valuable in its capacity to condense a vast amount of labor, knowledge, and time into a form that can be consumed quickly. But its value as an abstraction is also its shortfall. It obscures its origins as well as the violence experienced by corporeal and ecological bodies at the hands of anthropogenic climate change. I wove to reinsert the time, labor, materiality, affect, and embodied knowledge that had been stripped away. I wove to draw attention to these limitations and illegibilities, creating a space to reflect on what we do not see, whether that is the injustice of climate change or our personal relationship to a place.

In 2017 the context shifted, and as it did, so did the impetus of the project. Today we live amidst ever-worsening climate crisis: fires, floods, storms, droughts, crop failures, mass extinctions, cancers, Lyme, asthma, and more. Meanwhile, those in power expand fossil fuel extraction, interfere with the production and safe keeping of climate knowledge, and seed divisiveness. This is a politics of erasure within a system of obscured and severed relationships. In response, I look to the history of weaving as a subversive language for women and marginalized groups. In this context, the datascapes are a feminist, material archive of climate knowledge, care, and attention. This is a growing archive that traces multiple forms of entanglement in the face of climate crisis, seeking out and re-weaving otherwise obscured relationships—relationships between climate change, water, extractive industry, illness, and displacement; between disparate places; between personal and communal loss; between corporeal and ecological bodies; and between art, science, and social change.

For details and images of each series use the navigation menu to the left or click the images below.