Making "Nothing to See Here"

The concept for this piece came from a short trip I took in August 2021 to visit my parents and my Mamaw in South Texas, where my mom grew up. It was the first time my family didn't stay at Mamaw's house for a visit, due to COVID precautions, and we stayed at an AirBnB at Surfside, Beach instead. Looming to the north of the beach house was the massive Dow Chemical Complex -- whose eerie lights dominated the horizon in the mornings and evenings.

Dow Chemical from the porch. Photo Credit: Mary Jones

Growing up, I saw many scenes like this driving around Brazoria County with my family. Massive chemical and petrochemical plants sprawl across much of the south Texas coastal plains. My Grandpappy, Fred Whisler, worked in a similar facility in Alvin, Texas for most of his career as a handyman. As a child, even before I had any inkling of the long history of worker's safety violations and environmental contamination tied to these facilities, the plants felt always felt strange, impossibly large, and ominous.

I wanted to try and capture the disquiet that the plants bring up for me in a small tapestry. I started by printing cropped versions of the photo above and cutting them into a few pieces with sharp angles that radiated out from the chemical plant. I then shifted the pieces in relation to each other. I found the overall composition was still too dark for my taste, so I spliced in another image from a Surfside beach sunrise, which I positioned upside down so the horizon lines matched.

Final cartoon collage. Photo credit: Mary Jones

The resulting collage I scanned and used as my cartoon for the tapestry. I sett the piece at 8 epi using 15-ply cotton seine twine on my Mirrix Zach. For weft, I used a mixture of medium weight wool (2/9.5) from Weaver's Bazaar, Harrisville Shetland, Madelinetosh Tosh Merino Light and a few balls of fine wool I had hand-dyed years ago with pokeberry and goldenrod. I wanted to use something totally different for the chemical plants and tried DMC Diamant metallic thread to simulate its stark, otherworldliness. For the wool weft, I mixed three plies. For the thread, I used five plies.

Weft yarns used in the piece. Photo credit: Mary Jones

The most difficult part of the weaving was the prevalence of sharp vertical lines that spanned only 1-2 warp threads, thrust in the midst of a very controlled color-mixing for the sky. Unlike other pieces I have woven in the discontinuous style, once I was weaving the sky, I didn't weave much more than 6 picks in one section before moving on to the next - so progress inched up horizontally.

Weaving upwards. Photo credit: Mary Jones

I choose to make the sky progressively change color together, across the different fragmented pieces in the design. It was a fun to work on a coherent color progression, but made it more difficult to see the disjointed fragments that were so clear in the collage in the final woven piece. I'm still proud of this one and thinking about where to take this idea next.