This class explores the intersections of textile work in relation to the body. Students will engage with various forms of construction, including tapestries, inflatables, and the creation of soft objects. We will focus on the collision of traditional craftsmanship with global trajectories in contemporary art, viewed through the lens of somatic experience. Through hands-on workshops, students will develop technical skills such as natural/synthetic fabric dyeing, sewing, weaving, and collage. These methods will be implemented into the students’ sculptures and tactile works. Students will research artists who have pushed the boundaries of the medium—including Senga Nengudi, Hannah Woo, Sheila Pepe, and Ann Hamilton—to harness these influences in their own practice. The class combines artist presentations and short readings with prompt-driven projects that lead to independent work. Collectively, we will follow the lunar transits and create individual textile moon books, adding a page to it every week.

Slippages invite shifts between categories, meanings, and material states, unraveling expectations and opening pathways to new effects. In this studio course, we will explore the significance of relinquishing control, engaging with material processes that extend beyond our intentions, and embracing improvisation and responsiveness as foundational approaches to making. Students will investigate the physical and formal properties of materials alongside their historical, socio-political, bodily, and ecological dimensions, understanding them as interconnected systems. This inquiry will take shape through hands-on sculptural practices—including casting, metalwork, and assemblage—alongside other forms of material alchemy, such as cooking and composting. The course will delve into assemblage theory and philosophies of materiality from thinkers like Jack Halberstam, Jane Bennett, Mel Y. Chen, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Jasbir Puar, in conjunction with critical art discourses on sculpture and formlessness to deepen material investigations. We will contextualize projects through discussions of contemporary artists such as Carl Chang, Dora Budor, Dieter Roth, Kara Walker, Helen Marten, Lygia Clark, Robert Morris, Delcy Morelos, Mark Lecky, Carolyn Lazard, Eva Hesse, and Jack Whitten, among others. Throughout the semester, we will examine the limits of representation and explore what emerges through experimentation and abstraction, considering the capacity of artworks to act, decay, affect, evolve, or transform.