Bio
Tali Weinberg is an interdisciplinary artist and weaver whose work explores the inextricability of ecological and human health. Weinberg’s work is exhibited internationally and held in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, Denver Botanic Gardens, and Georgia Museum of Art. It has been featured in the Fifth National Climate Assessment, The New York Times, Colossal, NRDC’s onEarth Magazine, American Craft, Ecotone, and the Journal of the Data Visualization Society, among others. She is the recipient of an Illinois Artist Fellowship, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Brandford/Elliott Award for Excellence in Fiber Art, Serenbe Fellowship, Windgate Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, and grants from the Puffin Foundation and Illinois Arts Council. Her numerous residencies include New York’s Museum of Art and Design and a SciArt Bridge Residency for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Weinberg received her MFA from California College of the Arts and an interdisciplinary MA (Textiles & Social Theory) and BA (Peace Studies) from New York University. She currently lives in Champaign, IL.
Statement
I use intimate hand processes of weaving, dyeing, and coiling to explore loss, care, and possibility within the context of intertwined climate, biodiversity, and health crises. Made from plant-, insect-, and petrochemical-derived materials, the resulting textiles and fiber-based sculptures embody relationships between extraction, rising temperatures, species loss, pollution, and illness. These works simultaneously reference landscape and body, often sharing qualities with textiles for grieving and care, such as shrouds, burial flags, and hospital gauze.
Through weaving’s intersecting systems and structures, I merge scientific research with lived experience, record keeping with grieving, and handcraft with digital tools to retrace and reimagine relationships between corporeal and ecological bodies. Many recent works look to forests and watersheds as vital elements of our knowledge systems, immune systems, climate systems, and circulatory systems. Like us, they are harmed by the fossil fuel and chemical-intensive systems we live within. I photograph endangered tree species, tracing and weaving their silhouettes into porous plant-plastic forms that recall lungs, arteries, and roots. I also transform expired plastic medical materials once intended to support human circulatory systems into sculptures that evoke circulatory systems from the more-than-human world: tourniquets become tree rings and feeding tubes become river basins.
The decade-long Datascapes project has evolved in response to escalating threats to climate knowledge, bodies, and ecosystems. Climate data is woven into horizon lines, sedimentary layers, and shimmering waves, or coiled along medical tubes as fleshy bodies, tangled pipelines, and cascading water. Weaving's mathematical patterning and connections to computing lend it to data translation, while its embodied and relational qualities communicate in ways numerical data cannot. What began as a critique of data visualization is now a way to harbor vulnerable sources of knowledge while also weaving the social and political dimensions of the climate crisis and a sense of place back into the story the data tells.