Nene Humphrey: Weaving Geographies
Nene Humphrey's first trip to China, in 2002, was motivated by a desire to find communities where traditional textile crafts retained a central place in the culture. Her research and travels ultimately led to the Miao people of the southern province of Guizhou, who have sustained distinct forms of weaving and embroidery. The Miao, who have no written language, have developed intricate patterns of stitching to form a kind of historical narrative, the elaboration of which is undertaken primarily by women who both create and wear most of the embroidered garments. Humphrey's travels among the Miao-she has now been to Guizhou twice-are the inspiration for Weaving Geographies.
But this body of work is woven of many threads, most reaching deep into Humphrey's career as an artist, and the experiences that have shaped it. Weaving and sewing, as examples of embodied knowledge and as practices that reflect personal and social history, especially as understood by women, have been aspects of Humphrey's work for many years. She has worked with materials ranging from embroidery thread to wire rope, on surfaces that vary from organza to wallboard, exploring connections to her own family and, more generally, to the matrilineal descent of forms of expression that unite hand, eye and mind.
Cartography, integral to Weaving Geographies, serves as a rich metaphor in art-making, as mapmaking involves the transcription to two dimensions of an infinitely complex physical subject, partaking of fixed geological masses, fluid surfaces, and lived experience. In the catalogue for a 1994 exhibition called Mapping, which Humphrey has read with great interest, Robert Storr writes, "the particular opportunities maps provide visual artists-and their special appeal to modern sensibilities-result from their being the ultimate pictorial coincidence of exacting representation and total abstraction."' In the map-based work Humphrey has made since visiting China, she has examined the ways in which that polarity breaks down, making "exacting representation" a term nearly impossible to define with respect to either physical or social geography. Both micro- and macrocosmic mapping, and, especially, the porosity of boundaries between territories and regimes whether physical, temporal, or cultural, are at issue in her present work. Humphrey has also recently read a book by Richard E. Nisbett called The Geography of Thought, which considers differences between Western (linear) and Asian (cyclical or spiral) patterns of thinking, assumptions which are at issue in her work as well.
Humphrey's travels in China, and specifically in a remote region seldom visited by Westerners, immersed her in the manifold problems that attend translation, both of spoken language and of the greater cultural practices. In The Object Stares Back, another book that Humphrey has found pertinent to her present work, James Elkins writes about the reciprocity of objects and viewers, how the visible world shapes our perceptual apparatus, which in turn shapes the world as it is seen. "Because we cannot see what we do not understand or use or identify with, we see very little of the world-only the small pieces that are useful and harmless," Elkins writes. "Each act of vision mingles seeing with not seeing."' And it is not just knowledge that matters, but prior knowledge, long established and internalized: "Memory is necessary for vision," Elkins concludes. Confronting a culture as different from the developed West as that of the Miao produces acute awareness of the reciprocal blindness that Elkins describes. And the effort to address them, however incrementally, is one of the primary imperatives for Humphrey's present work.
"Weaving Geographies," the central work in this exhibition (as well as its overall title), is an installation that draws together wall and floor; line, surface and volume; handcraft and basic industrial technology. Along one wall, a pleated cotton curtain stretches between two doors. The pattern suggests an oversized skirt, cut and stretched out to full width-it was in fact suggested by the pattern of the full, pleated skirts made and worn by Miao women. But its size (56 inches high and 17 feet wide) and placement also connect it to architectural detailing, and wainscoting in particular. The cloth is dyed a deep, warm blue that resembles the indigo favored by the Miao, though Humphrey has actually used the cyanotype process, which involves a photo-sensitive chemical that turns blue when exposed (to sunlight, for best results). A venerable, pre-photographic technique (it was used, for instance, by early nineteenth-century botanists), cyanotype registers the contours of objects placed on a treated surface. Humphrey has chosen to scatter raw rice on the sensitized cloth, creating a pattern that is varied and subtle: it suggests a scatter of light, or of rain; a celebratory toss of grain; the periphery of a fireworks display; stars in a fading night sky.
Attached at various points to this cotton curtain are tightly wound little balls of red silk, and also slender ribbons of the same deep red silk, which trail to the floor before being caught up in a crocheted mandala that dominates the center of the installation. These red ribbons-red is the color of happiness in China-are knotted together with blue ones that extend from a handful of variously sized cloth spheres placed on the floor around the mandala, which are made from strips of the same cyanotype-dyed, rice patterned cotton from which
the skirt is made. In the crocheted form, the two colors blend in some areas but remain distinct in others. The ribbons that run across the floor connect to the central mandala like the spokes of a wheel to its hub, and as viewers carefully thread their way between them they enact a kind of slow, measured, circulating dance, one that has a striking parallel in Miao culture, where it is performed to the accompaniment of music played on a bamboo pipe called a lusheng.
Another important element of "Weaving Geographies" is a series of maps made of jacquard-loomed wool (which is produced on computer-guided looms, programmed with hand-drawn patterns) and felt, a fairly primitive textile. These pieces combine the contours of Wisconsin, Humphrey's home state, with those of Guizhou, though the identities of the two are confused by partial superimpositions, blurred boundaries, scale shifts, and shifts of orientation. And all are enlivened with a form of embellishment called needle felting, in which a long, sharp needle with a rasp-like point is used to repeatedly pierce the felt and draw through it strands of raw wool. A technique requiring a firm hand and an unmistakable element of aggression, it produces surfaces of surpassing delicacy and subtlety. Working with earthy colors of red, orange, ochre and olive green wool thread, Humphrey evokes topographical features (mountain ranges and depressions, inland seas) and the kinds of figures used for ethnographic maps: Xes and crosses, and other, less articulate notations. As one land mass slides out from under another, East is peeled away from West, but imperfectly: the impression is of tectonic friction, or of a kind of impermanent geo-cultural adhesion, expressed in passages of embroidery that are directed as much to the sense of touch as of sight.
Even more tactile is a pair of globes called "Small Worlds," covered with little balls of tightly wound silk that resemble tiny rosebuds. Varied in color from vivid red to deep gray, these buds form a surface that is richly textured but slightly repellent: floral, fleshy, even slightly charred. In some passages the maroon velvet surface to which the buds are attached is bared, as in a worn patch of heavily figured upholstery. The impression is of opulent beauty, as in Victorian decorative arts, poised on the verge of decay, a tipping point of particular interest to Humphrey. Like bonnets hung by the door, the "Small Worlds" are suspended from the wall by red silk ribbons, and additional ribbons run to the floor.
But domestic arts and feminine finery are not this work's primary reference: its title reflects Humphrey's attention to "Small Worlds Theory," a contemporary field of sociology that explores the increasing interdependence of historically isolated communities. Within the developed world, it examines connections between seemingly disparate individuals, as popularized by the theorem that every person now living is divided by only six degrees of separation. In Humphrey's work, Small Worlds Theory helps shape an understanding of the cultural exchanges and deformations performed under the aegis of globalism. Like an embryonic cytoplast, a cluster of cells in a state of profuse division and generation, her own "Small Worlds" teem with nascent life forms that appear to be too close for comfort, at once virulent and fragile.
In attenuated contrast to the crawling, introverted "Small Worlds," "Indigo Stretch" comprises a cluster of small balls wound from strips of cyanotype-dyed cotton. Extending from these balls is a cruciform arrangement of cloth strips, their ends pinned to the wall. Humphrey, Welsh and Irish in ancestry, was raised as a Catholic, and the iconography of the Church is reflected, if tacitly, in aspects of her work (for instance, in the blood-red rosebuds). In "Indigo Stretch," the body of the sculpture, bound to the wall between four outstretched arms of cloth, creates an image of tension that is also one of hard-won equipoise.
Further elements of Weaving Geographies include a number of small cyanotypes printed on paper, shorthand images that suggest sky charts of distant constellations or snapshots of festive rituals. The entrance to the exhibition also offers an accordian-fold book that combines ancient maps of China and photographs Humphrey took in Guizhou. It is accompanied by a digital audio track that includes recordings of Miao speakers, among them her translator singing a Miao shaman song and women at a festival singing to the accompaniment of lusheng music. In addition, Humphrey reads fragments of the diaries she kept while in Guizhou.
In his series of essays on the collusion of anthropology with art history, Thomas Crow observes the many ways that form and meaning shift when disparate cultures collide (he looks at societies ranging from Medieval France to late nineteenth-century Kwakiuth). "A transition from a supernatural cult to a secular one cannot be painless, nor can it entirely free itself from the residues of religious observance, from hopes and fears over salvation in a disenchanted world."' The Miao are an animistic people, and, as Humphrey's work makes clear, they live in a world as enchanted as any on the planet. Their world is also inexorably threatened by the seductions of global consumer culture. In Weaving Geographies Humphrey suggests, with sympathy and tact, both the spell that Miao culture casts and the introspection it elicits. As she puts it, "the further you are from home, the clearer your sense of self becomes." This insight is vividly expressed in her present work.
- Nancy Princenthal
1Robert Storr, Mapping. New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1994, p. 13.
2James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. San Diego and New York, Harvest Books, 1996, p. 201.
3 Elkins, p. 202.
4Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of Art. Chapel Hill and London, The University of North Carolina Press, 1999, p. 81.