Soft Cartographies

From the loom to the algorithm, the exhibition explores textiles as carriers of code and witnesses to shifting landscapes. Through weaving, felting, knitting and programming, the artists blend the digital and organic to map ecological change, and our relationships to it. The works demonstrate how textile techniques are sophisticated forms of encoding that require bodily presence, sensory attention and care. In doing so, the artists show us what fabric can hold that data alone cannot: the weight of water, the chemical signature of soil, ancestral knowledge and the duration of attention it takes to watch a place transform. Lili Süper’s works spin digital images back into physical matter. With each stitch representing a pixel, she translates video stills of satellite imagery and planetary mapping into knitted surfaces. Using open-source data from the European Copernicus Earth observation programme, the images show Earth’s surface marked by human influence: a Brazilian dam, a flood in Greece, the dried-up lakebed of Chew Bahir in Ethiopia, and the Rocky Mountains scorching with heat. Ella Yolande’s work draws on Susan Schuppli’s notion of material witness: the idea that matter carries trace evidence of past ecological events. She asks how these traces might be held in cloth, through natural dyeing and environmental alteration. Weaving together pigments, field notes and coordinates from sites on Dartmoor, her hand-dyed, digitally knitted garments become an alternative map, one that questions what is valued as data. In Thinking with Lichens: Attending to Trace, 3D scans show textile garments melded into the environments around them, so that fabric and landscape begin to blur. Renata Minoldo delves into more-than-human desire by queering traditional materials and methods of making, recognising moisture, natural fibres, botanical pigments and time as collaborators. Her four-part frame loom is a relational sculpture: its randomly knitted nets are collectively embroidered by visitors throughout the exhibition. Lacking conventional warp and weft, the loom is a soft container for sensory interaction, allowing participants to weave in any direction and establish nonverbal forms of communication - new codes. Two transitional pieces, neither fully felted nor woven but a hybrid membrane of both, are suspended so that both sides can be seen. Their holes and needle marks on felted, distorted fabric invite visitors to peek through. — Event Programme: Private View Friday 20th November, 6pm - 9pm In Conversation with Renata Minoldo, Lili Süper, Ella Yolande & Aisling Ward Sunday 22nd November, 2-3pm Weaving together we ripple: A workshop with Renata Minoldo Saturday 28th November, 11am-1pm: -- Bios: Renata Minoldo is an artist, botanical dyer and facilitator exploring intimacies, affect and memory. She builds temporary spaces for collective gestures of care and sensorial objects to access dreamy meditative experiences. Informed by queer feminisms and the post-natural, her work weaves more than verbal ways of communication with embodied knowledge, intuitive learning and vibrational ecologies through textile slow crafts, social engagement and an expanded sculpture practice. Lili Süper is an artist whose work is deeply entangled with the mystified visual language of technological imaging and planetary mapping. Heat, water, salt, elevation: each parameter can be isolated, intensified, and reassembled into a partial image of the world. These abstracted measurements are translated into textile structures, where every pixel becomes a stitch. Ella Yolande is a visual artist working across video, sculpture and textiles. Through video installations and plant infused therapeutic garments, her research touches on colonial botanical histories, queer ecology and artistic fieldwork practices. By considering the history and medicinal properties of plants, along with the need for mutual flourishing and rethinking the human body as individual, she explores how ecological sensitivities might be woven from living histories, infrastructures and sign givers. Aisling Ward is a curator and artist based in London investigating labour histories and collective resistance through archival materials, movement, and film. Her curatorial research explores the intersection of textiles, technology and social practice, examining how weaving and programming share spatial logics that resist binary thinking. Aisling has worked in a curatorial capacity with organisations such as University of the Arts London and Deptford X Festival.