Tali is an artist, activist, writer, curator, teacher, and scholar of textiles and social change.
Artist Statement
My practice investigates the multifarious politics of domestic space; the distorted categories of private and public; and the work of production and reproduction—of the food we eat, of the cloth we shelter ourselves with, of our homes, of social relations.
My process is both internal—an intimate relationship to materials—and inherently social—a reliance on the knowledge and skills of a network of individuals who enable me to bring a piece into being, whether they be the cultivator of cotton, the housing rights organizer, or the participants that join me in conversation. The work is grounded by extensive research into material, color, and language. Each invoke meaning and metaphor, content and history, which I use to produce forms that are, at once, abstract and loaded with information.
Using warp and weft as metaphor, I seek the structures and systems that lay below the surface, exploring the possibility of breaking social life down into its component parts and generating raw material with which to create something new. The production and deconstruction of cloth moves this inquiry from a philosophical to a material realm. The fundamental materiality of textiles transforms the intangible into something tactile. They are literally and figuratively a bridge between weighty histories of social change and our everyday lives as experienced in our homes and on our bodies.
Artist Statement
My practice investigates the multifarious politics of domestic space; the distorted categories of private and public; and the work of production and reproduction—of the food we eat, of the cloth we shelter ourselves with, of our homes, of social relations.
My process is both internal—an intimate relationship to materials—and inherently social—a reliance on the knowledge and skills of a network of individuals who enable me to bring a piece into being, whether they be the cultivator of cotton, the housing rights organizer, or the participants that join me in conversation. The work is grounded by extensive research into material, color, and language. Each invoke meaning and metaphor, content and history, which I use to produce forms that are, at once, abstract and loaded with information.
Using warp and weft as metaphor, I seek the structures and systems that lay below the surface, exploring the possibility of breaking social life down into its component parts and generating raw material with which to create something new. The production and deconstruction of cloth moves this inquiry from a philosophical to a material realm. The fundamental materiality of textiles transforms the intangible into something tactile. They are literally and figuratively a bridge between weighty histories of social change and our everyday lives as experienced in our homes and on our bodies.
