With sincere blasphemy, I employ the fallen glory of tapestry to reorient the holy image within queer cosmology. My materials – cotton, wool, synthetic gold, glass beads, and digital matter – are at once exquisite and contrived, further reflecting the irresolute tensions between queerness, ethnicity, and the sacred. New worlds are imagined where no resolutions can be made. 

 

I am defiantly a weaver. Through this position, I reconsider tapestry as a modality in which image, matter, technology, and embodiment provide productive conflicts for constructing form. Drag, in all its bombastic and glittering glory, is a guiding sensibility which I engage as a queer methodology to decadently retrace (and undo) faith, history, and legacy. Here, I employ digital interfaces in concert with improvisational handwork to mutate relics, devotional images, and ritual matter into opulent woven memorials that twist time. This temporal folding is further explored by drawing live weaving into videos and performances that engage time-based media through the linear logic of weaving. The resulting objects, videos, and performances are unbound from chrononormativity to rest, uncomfortably, within queer temporality. Released from the tyranny of the present, my work looks toward a future-past horizon where one can exalt queer grace.

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- John Paul Morabito