relational fabric making
This excerpt comes from my graduate thesis, where I articulate relational fabric making as both a methodological framework and an artistic practice. In this work, the relationship does not simply inform the fabric—the relationship lives within it. Working through batik, I create motifs using jump rope cord, allowing movement, tension, rhythm, and collaboration to be physically registered in the cloth. Grounded in nearly three years of work with Delores Finlayson and Robin Watterson of the Fantastic 4 Double Dutch team, this thesis asks what relational art looks like when accountability, conflict, and care are not abstract ideas, but materially embedded in the act of making.
relational fabric making, as a method within my practice, operates as a hybrid space. It borrows the social aspirations of Bourriaud’s theory while fully acknowledging the conflict central to Claire Bishop’s critique. Where Bourriaud frames relational encounters as temporary and utopian, my work insists on the reality of sustained engagement. In this thesis, I work through batik as an artistic site where relationship becomes material. The fabric is not a backdrop for collaboration. It is where collaboration takes place.
My collaboration with Delores Finlayson and Robin Watterson is built through real moments of friction and care. Working with people means navigating frustration, miscommunication, and shifting expectations. These moments are not separate from the work. They shape it. Through batik, this relational labor is absorbed into the cloth itself, registering time, movement, and tension through repeated, hands on processes.
This commitment has unfolded over nearly three years of shared labor and trust building. The stakes extend beyond the provisional conditions Bourriaud describes. The relationships are real, and so are the consequences they carry into the work.
At the same time, the project is temporally bounded, shaped by the timeline of my thesis and my graduation. The art world often frames relational encounters as temporary experiences, creating tension between lived responsibility and institutional limits.
relational fabric making holds this contradiction. It centers the non aesthetic labor, check ins, mediation, trust building, alongside the artistic labor of batik itself, insisting that both are essential to how the work takes form.
