The Textiles and Materiality Cluster at Milieux announces the winners of its recent round of student research grants. A Seed Grant (team) was awarded to Alyse Tunnell (BFA student) in collaboration with Jessica Bebenek and Mariana Stabile.
Alyse Tunnell, Jessica Bebenek and Mariana Stabile received a seed grant for their collaborative project, Read Thread. The team is interested in expanding how textiles have been used historically to present narrative as through illustrative tapestries, quilts, weavings and other such crafted items. Working from this history, they will explore how the qualities of materials can be used to represent different elements of narrative. Instead of using pictorial elements, they will investigate how tactility can be employed as a method of communication and storytelling. This project will be used to question if / how tactile experiences can be “read” in a way that is similar to reading written language. Further, the team is interested in how things we feel are interpreted as knowledge and respected as such. In this project, they aim to reveal and subvert the hierarchy of knowledge wherein words and other “objective” types of information are prioritized over sensations and other ephemeral and experiential knowledge.
textiles + materiality research cluster 