Nicholas D’Ornellas

Name: Nicholas D’Ornellas

Pronouns: he/him

Studio location: Jersey City, NJ, USA

Website / social links: nicholasdornellas.com, @nickdornellas

Loom type or tool preference: Hand cut & woven strips of screenpritned fabric. I just bought my first loom which is a 4 harness Macombre with 8 treadles.

Years weaving: 5

Fiber inclination: poly-cotton neutral toned fabrics are used as the substrate for every screenprinted image. Clothing from family & friends are recycled to create crochet/hand knotted rugs.

Current favorite weaving book: Rugs & Carpets of the World–Edited by Ian Bennett, Turkoman Studies I, Aspects of the weaving and decorative arts of Central Asia–Edited by Robert Pinner & Michael Franses

Contact information for commissions and collaborations: email address

 

 

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

As a primary school student in Guyana, I took a home economics class. One of the assignments was to take a 10 in. x 10 in. swatch of bleached cotton and turn it into an embroidered placemat with my name sewn onto it. I was taught how to needle pluck the weft threads from the warp to make a couple inches of fringe on each side of the piece of fabric. I remember immediately becoming obsessed with trying to get the length of the fringe evenly pulled. I restarted the assignment so many times that I never got to embroider my name on it. This beginning interaction with cloth was one of my earliest memories of feeling like my body and mind were aligned and working together to make something tangible and controlled.

This sense of challenge and comfort traveled with me as a high school art student in America. Two of my art teachers would take frequent trips to countries like Indonesia, Mexico and Italy. They'd bring me back woven textile pieces made by local weavers. Looking back, this was the beginning of me realizing how much I valued the aesthetic nature of how things and people exist. My art teachers became a backdrop for nurturing my instinctual gravitation towards design. At the time, I was processing the vernacular techniques used in weaving as I made drawings of the people in my life.

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 a textile based artist who uses techniques of printmaking and weaving as a conceptual backing for understanding familial structure and space.

3. Describe your first experience with weaving.

The first screenprinted image I ever wove was a passport photograph of my mother. Government issued photos have become a sterile tool that is used to identify someone, stripping them of their human emotions and qualities. I blew my mother's passport photo up to life size scale. Because of the nature of screenprinthing, my mother's dithered face became an archetype of a woman, a motif of someone we may know. I plain weave her face, which allowed me to take her portrait a step further into distortion. My mother has now become a pixelated field of color up close, and from far back, she is clearly recognizable. I was using the optics of illusion to play with distance and clarity to the viewer.

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My first time weaving on a loom was in 2019 at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. I was a part of a workshop class called ‘Floating Threads’ taught by Helle Rude Trolle. This was a life changing experience for me. Being immersed in an environment where you are collectively able to learn how to weave was healing. I came back to my art practice with a greater understanding of how I could use my body as a loom when I hand weave my screenprinted images. In a weird way, being able to learn the vocabulary of the loom allowed me to feel formally trained and confident to stand behind the work I am making.

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?

My photographs act as a vital archive, preserving fleeting mundanities in my home. The images capture a kind of freedom my family is unable to express outside of closed doors. By screenprinting these images, I can work at a larger scale, creating a more accurate representation of what I once experienced. The technical process of color separation slows the image down for me, as I expose and wash the bodies into clarity through the mesh of the screen. The fabric color I print on acts as a substrate that controls how the image is read and felt when inks of different opacities bleed into its fibers. Each pull in the printing process feels like a genetic build up of the people being depicted in the images. Their surroundings are an index of who they are at that point in time. I want to simulate a true visual recollection that mirrors real-life proportions in both color and scale, yet these images are only remembrances, and the mark of my hand traces my attempts to reconstruct a moment.

When the print is complete, everything that is portrayed is left in even clarity. Witnessing these images in their final state makes what they portray feel all the sudden artificial. I no longer feel the urge to preserve it, and respond by splicing the print into strips to hand weave them. When physically disembodying the image, I am redirecting its focus. This laborious act of taking apart to weave together, camouflages my memories. Weaving in patterns acts as a semiotic metaphor as I weave in the feelings of how the memory felt. I am able to inject what was lost when capturing the image. The craft of weaving is used as a mechanism to distort the original, no longer allowing it a visual function. In doing this, I, the weaver and the subjects portrayed, are the only people who can still hold onto the intimacy of that instance. The final weaving is evidence of the moment, but now it can only be felt and presumed to exist by the viewer.

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

I hope that my work serves the function of being an archive for documenting my family’s existence in America. I allow myself to reminisce inside a factual space by using images of my family inside of our old house. Screenprinting helps me veer away from reproducing the image from its photographic reference and use the memory of it as a vehicle for capturing feeling. Inside  these depictions of us, one could understand our relationship to each other, the objects around us in the space and the loudness that vibrant domesticity holds. Every object is perfectly placed but nothing is by design. It is a work of art and it is just real life.

I no longer live in the same house with all of the members of my family and I have chosen to not speak to some of them due to our different modes of processing our past. My prints have become a medium for questioning what it means to make a textile. I'm honoring realities facts while projecting moments of self inclination through abstraction by weaving the images. My weavings sit in a meta-realm of fact and fiction, past and present. They are more of a depiction of processing internal autobiography rather than just being a pictorial memoir. They are artifacts of labor and time spent alone in my studio. My weavings are a false sense of togetherness.

My art practice forces me to confront and spend time with my family in a partisan way. I have inherently created a false alter relationship with these people as l still cognitively live with them in my studio. This has caused my perception of them to be complacent between reality and myth as we all have grown beyond the people in the images. This is all an outcome of the tensions that occur between an immigrant family that did the best they could, but could no longer sustain each other inside of a strained political system that ended up leaking into our domestic lives. The family image continues to be a portal into talking about political structures and classist systems that travel through generations. I am learning how to heal without my source. This is something I've never had to do before. I am the only one who has chosen to process our traumatic past in this obsessive and devoted way.

 

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

My favorite part of the weaving process is sitting down and weaving. The image has already been screenprinted, the weaving pattern is drafted, two or more sets of prints are hand cut and then taped to a work table.  Using my tweezers to weave the weft strips  into the warp is a moment of meditation because I am able to see all of my prep work come into fruition. As I weave, my image is responding to the pattern it is being woven in. Seeing the image come alive strikes an adrenaline rush to finish the piece.

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 do not make a living from selling my weavings, but I do from screenpriting under a master printer. This job has afforded me to be able to have my own studio where I could sustain making new prints and draft specific weaving patterns for each of them. 

8. Where do you find inspiration?

I find inspiration in my mother’s story. She left behind everything she had and brought my sister and me to America for a more promising future. Inside of her story there is a great source of pain, strength, satire, and heroism. I consider my art practice a dream deferred for many of the creative people in my family who had to sacrifice so much of their lives for me to be able to go to college and pursue my own passions.

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When I was a child, my mom bought me a Game Boy for my first Christmas in America. I have a lot of nostalgia for grid pixelations and saturated glitches of color. I am interested in the concept of systematic coding through images. I find inspiration in technological metric systems and our ability as humans to be able to match it in the physical realm. I constantly question how interconnected this is to labor, politics, immigration status and classism. I project my own personal narratives onto associative depictions of the working class in my hometown. I see myself and my family in colorfully painted houses, decayed walls of chipped paint, construction sites, and people at our local bus station. As high rises are being built all around me, I am trying my best to hold on to the core memories I have of growing up in Jersey City.

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

I am interested in the work of Anni Albers, Shiela Hicks, Suchitra Mattai and Félix González-Torres. This collective of artists truly captures different aspects of the things I value in art. I find inspiration in how Albers was able to manipulate the loom to draw for her. Hicks is able to make textiles that are massive and can breathe when sitting inside of architecture. I consider Mattai's work an older guardian for my own practice. I find inspiration in how she is able to use our motherland, Guyana, as a muse for talking about ancestral lineage. The work of Félix González-Torres always makes me cry when I think about it. He was able to teach me how I could say so much with so little.

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

I think I would still find my way back to ideas of repetition even if I were no longer able to weave. Perhaps I would make experimental music and be a part of the underground rave scene. I’ve always admired how eternally young DJ’s are. It's fascinating how they are able to understand their intricate soundboards and all of the tools in their set. Creating sounds of reverb and making others feel things would be fulfilling job/lifestyle.