Hope Wang

Name: Hope Wang

Pronouns: she/her

Studio location: Chicago, IL, USA

Website / social links: hopewang.com, @hopeless_hope, @lmrm_chicago

Loom type or tool preference: TC2 digital jacquard & 8-harness floor loom

Years weaving: 7

Fiber inclination: Mercerized cotton, bamboo, and tencel. The shimmery stuff.

Current favorite weaving book: Marie Hazard’s artist catalog by Zolo Press and Igshaan Adams’ Desire Lines catalog accompanying his 2022 show at the Art Institute of Chicago

Contact information for commissions and collaborations: email address

 

 

1. How did you discover weaving and was what your greatest resource as a beginner?

In my first semester of art school, I took an Intro to Fibers course taught by Jovencio de la Paz. My first woven project was a frame loom weaving made of monofilament and dripped acrylic paint cured into plastic “yarn.” It was over from there, I guess. I took either floor loom or digital jacquard weaving classes every semester until I graduated. 

Coming from a painting and photography background, I was fortunate to have the guidance of many different artists, John Paul Moribato, Mike Andrews, and Heather MacKenzie, to explore weaving on several different kinds of looms and paradigms. Despite all the moving parts and technical constraints, weaving can still be so malleable to the idiosyncratic values people may inject into the process. I enjoyed learning in an environment where the practices of artists and teachers around me were vastly different but bending worlds in valuable, interconnected ways.  

I fell in love with weaving in the school’s loom room, filled with many different weaving technologies. This labour-intensive and bodily practice connected people I didn’t even know in the room as we simultaneously explored the tension and movement of single strands of yarn. Building one line at a time to make magic, surrounded by the sounds of looms clacking back and forth, I felt like the whole room was a chorus of movement that made weaving so energizing. When I was trying to rebuild my practice outside of the institution, that camaraderie was something I really wanted to maintain because it was an intrinsic part of why I loved creating in the first place.

2. How do you define your practice – do you consider yourself an artist / craftsperson / weaver / designer / general creative or a combination of those? Is this definition important to you?

I’ve always been kind of reluctant to call myself a weaver…I’m sure there’s a lot of reasons for why I don’t quite align with the associations I have with the term, especially in the context of the US art world, but I haven’t quite articulated for myself what it is.

I mentioned earlier that I was also a painter and photographer before I began my love affair with weaving, so I believe in living multiple lives that overlap and inform each other, rather than being eclipsed by whatever is most recent or visible. I love having this growing toolbox of things that operate as different languages of making. For example, I feel the language of weaving offers a different paradigm around material and bodily relationships, in a way that may be different than, say, photography. And languages often do not have 1:1 translations, so when you use one language to describe another, you always “lose” some fidelity and meaning, but gain many other meanings in describing concepts relative to that loss. I think there’s a lot of wonderful possibilities in bridging that space.

I basically lean into other modes of making/existing based on what suits the idea. I wear a lot of different hats in various projects that all broadly serve creative trajectories. For example, I also organize and facilitate creative programming focused on textile work in Chicago. I see this as very much part of my design practice, and a different kind of weaving, if you will, of resources.

3. Describe your first experience with weaving.

My first floor loom experience resulted in what was more a 10 yard constellation of small bird nests than it was warp. Truly a battle of the wits between how stubborn those tangles were and how stubborn I was to detangle it. Somehow I went back for more.

I am very much an experiential learner, so I valued “failing” at weaving in person. I think it’s incredibly difficult (for me) to learn weaving remote or from online tutorials. When folks ask me how weaving works, even when they are physically in front of the looms, they still have a hard time grasping the mechanics of how cloth comes together. Few people have reference for how the body fits into these tools unless they feel the resistance of individual yarns and their surprise for how strong it can be, or how much force you have to flick through your wrist to throw a shuttle across an open shed. So I find it beautiful to know that…you just had to be there. You just had to be there with someone else; transferring this knowledge has always been relational. I see that energy as part of what weaving encapsulates beyond the cloth itself.

4. What is your creative process, from the initial idea to the finished piece? Are there specific weave structures, looms, or fibers that are important to your process?

In my studio, the first order of business is digging and dumping. I accumulate material - photographs of spray painted notations on the sidewalk, traffic cones kicked over by erratic drivers, screenshots of Google Maps parking lots scarred from midnight drag races, poems about light and labour, colour swatches from Chinese drama costumes, bricks from the lakefront, guavas pruning in the sun. 

I love editing and reiterating ideas spanning across years for content in my work. I am always working on multiple things at once and they inform each other over time. I like working on a leg of the journey until I get to a good stopping point. I tend to let something sit until the next step feels right (or an exhibition deadline comes up). Most of my pieces take a year, if not longer, to become fully realized. A lot of living and dying happens in between. 

On the technical side, almost all of my floor loom work incorporates painted warps and double cloth structures, so I stick to standard twills. Nothing super exciting, but since I gravitate toward shiny yarns like mercerized cotton and tencel and bamboo, twills…just oof. They work. On the TC2, I tend to use 16 shaft shaded satins on 3 weft structures. Recently, I tried my first painted warp on the TC2 and had a blast departing from my usual approach. I used much simpler structures (7 shaft satin single weft) because the warp itself had so much going on already. I also really enjoy the "embossed" effect of pairing warp-facing patterns directly next to super weft-facing patterns. Really fun to see how light reflects off them differently and creates even more dimensionality.

 5. Does your work have a conceptual purpose or greater meaning? If so, do you center your making around these concepts?

A lot of it is about being sad in public space. If my heartache had a background, this would be it; an inside joke with myself.

 

6. What is your favorite part of the weaving process and why? What’s your least favorite?

What I love about weaving is the beauty of having premeditated rules on how tension must be created and maintained in order for one to turn something incredibly malleable into a structured line. In understanding that formula, the weaver is then able to play and be creative with how the grid can bend on and off the loom. My father once asked me in the first few years I got into weaving, why I felt inclined to something with more constraints compared to a blank canvas where I could move my brush around without limitation. And I responded that those “constraints” are what I love about this way of making. I tend to be very outcome-oriented and sometimes spend too much time internally wrestling with that, and on a loom, you often only see the 10 inches of the work at a time. Sometimes it can be incredibly frustrating, other times I think it challenges me to trust my gut in fruitful ways. 

Weaving caters to my perfectionist sensibilities but also allows me to let go of them. For example, when the textile comes off the loom, it is no longer straight or tight - it no longer “behaves.”And even when you meticulously set up a design, sometimes the most exciting magic happens outside of that plan. I think it’s a constant lesson in discipline and humility for me; knowing you can’t control everything. That’s probably my least favorite thing about weaving as well!

7. Do you sell your work or make a living from weaving? If so, what does that look like and how has that affected your studio practice?

I operate a project space called LMRM (loom room) that rents out two 8 harness floor looms for artists to use for independent projects. My dream is to add a TC2 digital jacquard to LMRM and facilitate access to it through an experimental open studio model. On top of this, it’s surreal to say that currently, my main income stream comes from selling and presenting artwork.

Frankly, I struggle a lot with the retail part of being an artist, and often get exhausted talking about my work in a way that pushes the work (or me, as an artist). Being my own sales rep takes a lot of joy out of the interactions I want to have with people. This is something I’m reflecting heavily on during my self-funded sabbatical, when I “closed the garage doors” on my studio practice. I am currently re-examining what freedom, pleasure, and abundance look like when it comes to work.

8. Where do you find inspiration?

Parking lots. Surrounded by birdsong outside before slipping into a building for work. Driving past a construction zone glittering with fluorescent traffic cones. Walking down the sidewalk on an incredible day of February sun bursting through the grey of a long Chicago winter. In a train car, where everything blurs into colour fields broken by gestural graffiti signatures. Biking through the summer heat after a long day of work. You can smell the asphalt baking and the world becomes a kaleidoscope by way of the sunset glinting off warehouse windows.

9. If you could no longer weave, what would you do instead?

This actually was my reality after being jettisoned from art school and its institutional access to TC2 jacquard looms and 8 or 16 shaft floor looms. I was not in a place to purchase expensive equipment or studio space required to house that equipment, and the city I lived in did not have a community studio designated for textile artists. This lack propelled me toward a community print shop, because it felt the most affordable way to continue to create. It already had the expensive large tools, as well as the staff to maintain them. It was home to a community of printmakers who were excited to make things around each other without a huge investment. I first met my current business partner, as well as the fellow artists who have most supported my early career, there. My experience of that print shop’s infrastructure is actually what invigorated me to start LMRM (loom room), which is my fledgling version of an artist-focused community weaving studio in Chicago. 

Ultimately, I think it’s important to be nimble and to iterate across mediums. Translation in my work is a guiding force, both in concept and in the materialization of the same idea across the different languages of poetry, painting, photography, print, etc. For me, some ideas don’t initially “work”as a physical textile until I’ve tinkered on it through another process. 

Honestly though, I don’t know if I could ever not weave. The material isn’t always yarn and the apparatus isn’t always a loom as we know it, but I think weaving happens in my life all the time.

Do you have any upcoming exhibits, talks, or events the community should know about?

Get connected with LMRM! We’re doing a lot of new development of the project space right now, but will re-open in July, 2023 with some very exciting announcements. In the meantime, I will be presenting at the Digital Weaving Conference during June 23-25, 2023. It is hosted by Praxis Fiber Workshop in Cleveland, OH. September 2023-March 2024, I will exhibit work with Keith Kaziak at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum in Milwaukee, WI.