Impractical Weaving Suggestions
Combining Minimalist influences and domestic weaving practices, Fairbanks's work explores relationships between the impracticality and practicality of each form. Uncovering visual affinities between the disparate arenas of abstracted geometries and domestic labor provides the springboard for bold, material-based explorations. With the simple over-under or binary rules of weaving cloth, complex patterns and sometimes painful color relationships are revealed.
The works in Impractical Weaving Suggestions acknowledge structures and effects embedded in the intersections of cloth that, because of their small scale, often go unseen and unconsidered. By inflating the scale, embedded layers of labor and sophisticated math-based systems are exposed. The wall weaving installations display the magnified structures in a radical palette of neon plastic material that feels electric and loud. In the case of the drawings and jacquard weavings, questions of value, labor, and time are posed more quietly. The playfulness expressed through the color choices, processes, and materiality offers a freshness and another point of entry into the dialogue and tension that persists between high vs low, and industrial vs handmade.