Re-Weavings: Data, Grieving, and Embodied Practice for Climate Crises

I weave climate data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) into abstracted landscapes and waterscapes. The data is coded and materialized with plant-derived fibers and dyes and petrochemical-derived medical tubing. These woven and coiled interpretations simultaneously reify and abstract, respect and critique the data they materialize. In this presentation I share the political and personal questions that have guided the progression of these woven climate datascapes as well as the process of translation/materialization that gives the same weight to landscape and the body as it does to the data itself. Because data is a relatively patriarchal, capitalist, colonial form of knowledge, in this project weaving becomes a way to (re)insert other forms of knowledge—knowledge that is embodied, gendered female, indigenous, and relational more than representational. I draw on a long history of weaving as a subversive language for women and other marginalized groups, creating a feminist, material archive of climate data in response to the current political climate. I examine and reorganize how the data is aggregated, questioning the politics, power, and assumptions embedded in these aggregations. Through this work, I suggest that weaving is a way to sense what is otherwise obscured in a data visualization: time, labor, fragility, place, grief, care, the embodied practice of data collection, and the material/organic origins of the data.