Leithian, 2017

BFA Alumni

Major: Textile & Fashion Design

Graduation Year: 2018

Artist Statement:

People in all strata of society use clothing to perform self. I make garments and fabrics that reference constructed identity through repetitive textile processes.
I investigate ‘self’ through a temporal lens, looking at prehistoric craft disciplines and the human capacity for symbolic display with my main medium-- textiles and fibers. Importantly, I create many of the textiles, spinning, weaving, dyeing, and more. Processes such as weaving lead to fabrics that take weeks to produce and only minutes to cut to pieces.
My work is tied to my experience as a queer individual, and the ensuing search for identity when the ‘conventional’ narrative has failed you. Humans appropriate their past, materially, mythologically, and then construct themselves in the present based on incomplete assessments of times gone.
Through accumulation, weight, and materiality, I am exploring how people create an identity from the frameworks surrounding them, and the potential of textile as text- that is to say, an implicit narrative with which we wrap ourselves. My garments are a rejection of the hard line between past and present, the comfort of nostalgia and painful histories. Throughout human history societies have used social symbols to display status, identity, and purpose without need for words.