Woven Time and Place

Weaving is rich with metaphors for life and heritage. In working with weaving traditional and non-traditional materials the past and present can exist in the same time frame. In order to weave something together on a loom you have to start with one material to be you warp first. This goes on to the loom, attached to all of the moving parts and threaded into all of the heddles. From there you prepare you material for the weft to weave over and under the warp. The time between these two layers separates them while simultaneously blends them into one piece. In this way, weaving is life. Our past experiences inform our present experiences. As we live through an event in the now, our brain immediately starts to process, categorize, and tries to understand the event, as it is happening. The only way in which it can do this is by drawing on what it already knows from the past. The memory starts forming right away, but as memory is only formed on what we know, and not what we don’t know, it is inherently faulty. The perception is one sided. To get more of the full understanding we would need to know what other around us are thinking and processing. Our feelings of place and home feed into our understanding of ourselves and those around us as well. Some people fully identify with one place as a large part of who they are as an individual, while others identify with multi places or even no place at all. Time, place, and experiences all combine in different ways to create the fabric that is our lives and our connections to others.