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Arts & Communication Textile agency in art

conceptualized the contact of home textiles with the depth try to break through it in their own way. However, it is in
of the subconscious, as well as the “fabric landscapes” by the interplay of these two media, when abstraction and
Lia Cook, who perfected the esthetics of digital Jacquard figurativeness collide, that the uniqueness and power of
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weaving. The female experience of reality, which revealed painting emerge .
its tactility, flexibility, and ephemerality, encouraged artists In his search for the essence of painting, Richter
to combine various forms of expression, in the synthesis of was interested in ancient Persian knotted carpets, their
which textiles played an essential role. decorative flatness, and abstract ornamental structures. He

Computerized Jacquard looms have also sparked the also exhibited a series of Jacquard loom-printed tapestries
artistic experiments of textile artists. Computer programs “Yusuf,”“Musa,”“Iblan,” and “Abdu” (2009) at the Kunst
connected to traditional Jacquard weaving looms allow &Textil exhibition in 2013–2014 in Wolfsburg and Stuttgart,
artists to weave cloth based on accurate photography and based on scans of his own oil paintings “Abstraktes Bild”
achieve a more effective interplay of reality and fabric, (1990). In this way, Richter metaphorically compared
creating large-scale paintings, and conveying various the brushstrokes and the surface of the plane of abstract
nuances of threads in them. For artists collaborating with painting to the macrostructure of a fabric using digital
industrial companies, this gave strong impulses to new technology. The color strokes, transformed into a relief
creative forms. The fabric that incorporates photography pattern of cotton, wool, silk, and acrylic threads of varying
into a visual narrative connecting the tactile sense with the thickness, highlighted the normally invisible ground of
optical, led Žaltauskaitė Grašienėto her creative searches the canvas. It also developed the dialogical nature of the
as well. The image made up of many pixels woven by a painting, providing allusions to folk craft, the tapestry
computerized Jacquard loom is not a direct transfer of the tradition, embroidery, weaving, and other areas of women’s
photograph to the fabric because the photograph woven creative work.
into the network of threads acquires an additional esthetic In Žaltė’s oeuvre, photography also invites us to reflect
and semantic charge. Žaltė explains the importance of on the textuality of textiles and their deep structure. She
textiles in her oeuvre as follows: “Woven fabric is like defines her method as follows: “I don’t turn photographs
a second skin, without which you cannot exist, feel, and into a woven structure by accident. Realistic photography is
survive. Threads can be associated with various human transformed into combinations of intertwined threads that
senses, conveying the ideas of heat-cold, heaviness- we can only decipher more precisely from a distance. When
lightness, and softness-hardness. Photography perfectly you get closer, it’s a kind of intricate system of dots, which I
reflects the structure and form, but it cannot reveal the think works subconsciously – we seem to be entering some
true state of touch, evoking the tactile sensation” (personal kind of inner state” (personal communication).
communication). She stretches her tapestries over the frames like the
While nurturing the dialogue between photography canvases of a painting, sometimes letting them fall freely
and textiles, the artist follows Gerhard Richter, examining down like curtains. The pixels that make up the digital
his creative method and photo paintings. His oeuvre image are transformed into weaving knots and networks
is also inseparable from photography. He transforms of threads, creating abstractions whose intricacies come
photographic images into abstract paintings or overlays into focus as the form fades away. In one of the recent
them with paint and photographs the strokes of paint, monumental works, “WWW. Women oWn Writing”
magnifying them many times. The artist is impressed (2022), measuring 230 × 420 cm, we can see from afar an
by his technique of blurring the image of reality. When infinite horizon of being reminiscent of a cosmic landscape.
changing the viewing angle, the brightness, precision, and However, when you get closer, it appears as a raster optical
shape of the snapshot begin to change in the photograph, system, alluding to the pattern of a multi-layered cloth –
turning into an opaque, mysterious veil, or curtain. In a complex system of small black and white squares. It is
Richter’s paintings, which make us question the objectivity a unique coded language composed of an active one and
of the photographic image, motifs of curtains and shrouds a passive zero, which is associated with the digital world
are repeated over and over again as metaphors of time and encoded by two kinds of digits (ones and zeros). In this
memory. Depicting folded fabrics that cover the surfaces way, profound poetics emerges at the interface between
of reality, the painter reveals that the painting is also just technology and art, which seems to connect the distant
a surface (canvas) that covers and hides reality to uncover past with the present, linking all that is real and virtual.
and unshroud it, at least a little. The reality itself is, as it Žaltauskaitė Grašienė, in her art works, reflects on
were, an impenetrable curtain behind which there are only archaic weaving methods and new technologies, looking
imaginations and illusions – painting and photography for their paradoxical points of connection. It was at the

Volume 1 Issue 2 (2023) 7 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1867