Material Interactions: Data-Driven Community Quilting

Rachel Ivy Clarke

I consider myself a non-traditional artist, in that I simply like to make things. I make functional, everyday, useful objects, but ones that incorporate beauty and meaning and rise above the mass-produced, cold and hollow objects that fill our lives. In the past I’ve made everything from dance costumes to crystal paperweights, but I’m currently focused on textile forms with social and communal roots such as clothing, quilting, and knitting. To me, textile arts embody an individual’s style and creativity, but also a communal component, such as wartime knitting circles or quilting bees of yore. At its heart, my work builds on these typically feminine folk art traditions by juxtaposing them with theories and principles of data, classification, and library and information science with the goal of provoking viewers into seeing both textile arts and data in new ways.