in the soft lining of the universe, there is a knot

2026

*the magical becoming of your milk white bones*
hand-woven cotton and synthetic, heat pressed text and images by my mother
12” x 22’

*the hooves of one hundred oxen / can you tell me about your palms*
forged steel, cotton, synthetic, heat press dye, photograph of an ancestral ranch in San Juan Capistrano, CA
12” x 32”

*stork bite / gentle spring*
a poem by my mother etched on steel, in the shape of the artist’s birthmark
15” x 27”

*landscape of our distance (boney mountain)*
industrially woven wool and cotton, naturally dyed with marigolds, steam-bent ash armature
60” x 5’ x 2’

*witness of the blue: the walnut tree (stands closer to the time / when your mother was red clay, sea foam, spores)*
hand-woven cotton dyed with walnuts collected in Chicago, Douglass fir box stained with the walnut dye
12” x 22’

*a knot whose center holds the distance between you and i*
Indigo dyed wool and cotton, industrially woven at The Weaving Mill
60” x 6’

In the soft lining of the universe is a knot

whose center holds the distance between you and I

Land is where our navels meet

Where you become you and I become me.

Emerging from a series of exchanges between myself and my mother, I turn to fiber, sculpture, and natural dye practices as a site of contemplation that prods at the tender, the enduring, steadfast love and relation between ourselves and our mothers. We are undeniably tied to one another, and the land we come from. The weaving operates as an embodied language articulating distance, tracing origins, unfolding desire, and locating the cord that connects us.

Indigo, a rhythm of silence, a knot with no ends.

A love that is taut, between the moment I left your body

and the endless continuum of time

Documented by Jaeden Hannus