Kayla Mattes

Name: Kayla Mattes

Studio location: Los Angeles, CA

Website / social links: kaylamattes.com, @kaylamattes

Loom type or tool preference: Leclerc Tissart

Years weaving: 11

Fiber inclination: Wool and cotton, ideally reclaimed

Current favorite weaving book: Hannah Ryggen, Threads of Defiance

 

 

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

I accidentally happened upon the Textiles department during my first year at Rhode Island School of Design. The complexity of the weaving room fascinated me and I realized it could be a fitting route to take my interest in color and pattern. That’s where I learned how to weave. My greatest resource was the weaving professor Susan Sklarek and all of the talented women in the program. I miss weaving in a room with 20 other looms and 20 other weavers. Learning weaving can be intense in the beginning, so having the support tied to a collaborative environment was important. Plus, the musical quality of a big loom room is a special thing. I actually ended up leaning more towards other disciplines, like machine knitting, during my time at RISD, but came back to weaving later on when I was out of school.

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 consider myself an artist and weaver or an ‘artist who weaves’. I’m a skilled weaver who is adept in the craft, but I do first and foremost think of myself as an artist. Definitions can be limiting, and I feel that craft and art are always intersecting, even though they’ve historically been put into separate domains.

3. Describe your first experience with weaving.

I vividly remember the first weaving assignment in my Weaving 1 class after we tackled warping and dressing the loom. We had to weave a sampler of twenty different textures using just plain weave. It was a helpful way to understand how different materials, and packing densities, can result in limitless variations with the simplest of weave structures. As a tapestry weaver who now mostly uses plain weave, I think that assignment still makes an impact on my material choices.

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?

I start with drawings. Sometimes I use crayons to make quick gestural studies that help ideas flow without the time restrictions of weaving. My drawings usually get brought into Photoshop where I’ll collage appropriated symbols and imagery found online or from photos I take of symbols, advertisements, and signage while I’m out and about. I use an overhead projector to transcribe the final collages onto paper for a tapestry cartoon, which is placed behind the warps as a guide while weaving. Once I start the weaving process I allow myself to break out of the plans of the cartoon when it feels right. Overplanning can be a bad thing, and some of the best moments in my pieces happen when I make spontaneous edits in the cartoon or choose an unexpected material to translate particular motifs. I hand-dye a good amount of the yarn that I use in my tapestries. Lately I’ve been incorporating dip-dyed wool that organically forms a pixelated gradient type of ground color when woven.

My weavings are tapestries, or “weft faced, woven cloth with discontinuous wefts” and while my work is rooted in that tradition, I also like breaking the rules. Warps often show through wefts, I collage found objects or separate woven elements onto the surfaces, embroider into the weave, and sometimes incorporate structures other than plain weave when I’m working on my 4-harness Harrisville.

 

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

For years my work has been invested in materializing digital culture through a process that is structurally and historically tied to the screen. Weaving functions within a binary system, zeroes and ones, or warp vs. weft. Ironically my work doesn’t really utilize weave drafts which relates more directly to that history, but I embrace the grid and natural pixelation that occurs when weaving pictorial images and text through the tapestry process.

I also see the work as archival. I’m materializing and slowing down fleeting moments from screen culture, that flood through our feeds at a frenetic pace that is difficult to retain. This is where it can become interesting to reference the narrative history of tapestry, whether it’s through the compositions or by using contemporary symbols that articulate our times. With my recent body of work I’ve been attempting to visualize grief tied to the reality of the climate crisis from the unexpected perspective of cats. I came to this strategy after thinking about how cats are perceived within our culture. They’re honest about their feelings, hesitant, fiery, expressive, and judgmental, plus they’re the unofficial mascots of the internet. They have this incredible power to disseminate information and are carnivores who will inevitably be affected by environmental degradation. Reflecting on the climate crisis through the lens of cats also instills humor in the work, despite the bleak subject matter. I’m interested in this contrast, and how comedy can deliver a message, or make tragedy easier to process.

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

I’m a logical and methodical person, so I’m drawn to the structure inherent in the weaving process. There’s a defined beginning and end and a set of rules in place to get from one point to another. At the same time weaving, especially tapestry, has spontaneity to it, which is a nice balance.

My least favorite moment in weaving is when I’m approaching the last couple inches of a piece, because I’m so eager to cut it off the loom and unwind the piece from the front beam for the big reveal.

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 work with galleries who sell my work. I also teach, and typically have a range of projects in motion. At the moment I’m lucky to be full-time in the studio, which is new and probably temporary, but in the past I’ve always cobbled together strange, yet flexible part-time jobs, alongside my studio practice.

Whether you’re living off your work, or not, I think it’s important to mentally separate yourself from the stress attached to this reality when you’re in the headspace of making, and to not be afraid of making bad work or side projects that you will never sell or show to anyone. I have tons of rudimentary crayon drawings that look like children’s scrawl, but they help me process what I want to make happen in my tapestries.

8. Where do you find inspiration?

Signage, memes, politics, medieval tapestries, user interfaces, social media, current events, the internet, my cat, symbols, typography, and plants to name a few.

I’m currently working on this interview in my studio at 6 pm. Around this time every night a dozen or so dying bees from a hive next door somehow find their way inside and pitifully crawl around the floor during their final moments. I sweep up their little fuzzy bodies the next day. I wish I could help them—PSA: the sugar water thing is a viral scam. It’s a quirk of the space, but also this heart-wrenching indicator of our times. I’ve been strategizing on how to incorporate bees into my next piece.

9. What other creatives do you admire – weavers, artists, entrepreneurs – and why?

Hannah Ryggen’s political tapestries have been a huge influence to me over the years. It’s been exciting to see her work get more attention, after decades of being overlooked.

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

I currently have a solo exhibition, Cat-astrophe, up at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles that runs through December 21st, and my woven tweet series is in a show, Know Your Meme: Stitching Viral Phenomena, at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles until January 12th. I’ll also have some work in a group show called Textiles: A Social Media at Missouri State University from March 6th- April 10th and will be teaching a weaving class at Wildcraft Studio School in Portland, Oregon the weekend of February 15th.