Spectral Inheritance, Transparency, and Touch: Kay Sekimachi’s Nylon Monofilament Hangings

San-Francisco born weaver Kay Sekimachi (b. 1926) was first introduced to art-making as a teenager while incarcerated at the Tanforan detention center during World War II, and following the war she continued her studies under the tutelage of Trude Guermonprez. In the early 1960s Sekimachi began working in the industrial medium of nylon monofilament, producing multi-weave sculptural forms that play with transparency and the architectonics of negative space. Plastic’s affective associations in the post-war period varied dramatically due to anxiety surrounding its potential toxicity, its relationship to the war, and its sudden ubiquity as a household good. As a material for weaving, the plasticity of the nylon monofilament allowed for multiple layers to be modeled into three-dimensional shapes by keeping the memory of touch. Sekimachi’s nylon monofilament hangings open onto questions of inheritance through their materiality, material history, and the method of weaving itself, as it was only after the artist started weaving that her mother revealed that a sash she had managed to store prior to the family’s forced removal was prepared from silk that she had woven and dyed herself. Sekimachi’s silent inheritance of weaving resonates with the transmission of memory following the incarceration, which was often left unspoken. These practices of silence speak to the possibilities of spectral inheritance, or that which is passed down through absence. Sekimachi’s nylon monofilament hangings obscure as much as they reveal, offering an unevenness in their registration by the viewer to frame the question of the submerged memory of the incarceration.