Karen Rubado, Unweaving the canvas, 2023

Viv Davy is intrigued by a textile practice that unravels weaving to reflect life’s transience.

Meeting Karen for the first time at the local airport as she arrives to start her artist residency, I find that her luggage is loaded up with her beloved travelling loom. This trusted tool accompanies Karen globally, enabling her to respond to her circumstances in a loom-woven structure of expression. I suspected the rest of the luggage mostly held yarns and other hand tools needed to create on the travel loom, and indeed it did.
Karen was using her residency to explore her next conceptual pathway: how to express the impact of minute changes on the surface of a reality. This body of work was inspired by chaos theory, and for me, it resonated with fascination about how choices have ripples we cannot begin to imagine as we make them. For Karen, a diasporic who experienced a childhood of frequent moves, this question always lingers. What if b had happened instead of a?

The need to be exploring, moving, restlessly searching became hardwired in Karen through her youthful experiences of disruption to the extent that anxiety would only settle when she was once again in motion. The legacy from this early life is a strong sense of self-reliance, of resolving questions and problems by herself rather than seeking others’ help. This soul-searching for answers and understanding has informed many of Karen’s woven works.

Karen weaving on her travel loom

In an early exhibition, Detours and Daydreams, the woven sculpture “Life Line” explores ancestry and the sense of belonging.

Handwoven elements suspended from wire structures suggest a cocoon, a tent, a shelter… but not quite.  This work speaks to me of a longing to be anchored, yet free, to be protected while still feeling surrounded by uncertainty and vulnerability. While the poles supporting the work look strong, their anchoring appears vulnerable, fragile; the cascade of the woven threads feels fugitive. Our heritage and our ‘roots’ remain with us, but their strength ebbs and flows through our life’s journey. The self-sufficient interior stability that Karen brings to her life is reflected in the woven portions of this work. The strength of the consistency of the over-under structure, the vibrance of the emotional colour palette, and the free draping that allows movement within constraint play against the vulnerable overall structures. These structures are a physical expression of the liminality of being a traveller from one culture to another and then back again. Nothing is fixed, including the sense of belonging.

Karen’s earliest woven practice began with salvaged materials while she was studying for her Master’s Degree in Fine Arts with a focus on Sculpture. Her initial explorations involved breaking the rules and pushing the boundaries of woven structures, testing a new creative space for its limits. When she describes this part of her creative journey, to me, a diasporic individual, it speaks to how arrival in a different culture often triggers an instinct to question and reimagine.

For Karen,

“Weaving is a methodical and meditative practice that allows one to oscillate between periods of mind wandering and concentration. Repetition is frequently disrupted by uncontrolled events that show up in the work as blemishes. It is the imperfections that I find intriguing. They point to disrupted expectations and moments of transformation that contrast with snippets of well-choreographed intersections.”

broken, 2018, mercerised cotton, 500 x 1.2m

Through the rhythm of weaving, the mind drifts between the conscious and the subconscious. In this space, links and memories surface, offering a way to reflect on personal histories. For Karen, whose young life was shaped by the move from Aotearoa New Zealand to the United States, this meditative process has been a way for her to examine the arcs of her journey across cultures and continents. Returning to Aotearoa New Zealand as an adult, Karen, like many diasporics, found herself belonging neither to where she came from nor to where she had arrived.

This raises the question: What if different choices about location had been made?

The exhibition Unravelling Certainties looks at this question. Firstly, Karen weaves her “canvas” on the loom and while it is still restrained by the loom, paints the surface of the created canvas with a plant-based paint. The paint is not a dye, but rather it creates a coating on the woven threads. Once fully dry, the meticulous, slow process of unweaving begins. The now-painted weft thread is kept in exact order as it is unwoven, the surface handled delicately to ensure the paint is not dislodged from the surface. Once it has been unwoven, Karen proceeds to reweave the ‘canvas’ thread by thread.

Because of this elemental change—the paint application to the surface of the original canvas —there is a ripple effect of change throughout the entire reweaving. The end result is an expression of this impact—a ghosted image of the original painting can appear as the rewoven canvas. However, the true magic of this as an expression of our life’s pathways is that the chaos may be so complete that the original painting is no longer traceable. Instead, the work becomes a quiet meditation on transformation: the impossibility of returning unchanged.

Karen’s early fascination with loom-based weavings was sparked by observing traditional Thai weavers at work. This speaks to the universal  language of woven cloth and how people across the eons have found their expression and their sense of purpose at a loom.

These days, Karen and her husband spend time each year in his homeland, France, with, of course, the faithful travel loom. Perhaps now a safe space has been created around her practice: a space that allows her to explore experiences across cultures, reach back into her ancestry and roots, and carry this learning forward.

Karen’s textiles evoke the threads that bind us—fragile, resilient, interwoven—bearing witness to the migrations, transformations, and possibilities that shape our lives.

Further reading

• Weaving Structural Improvisation
• Unravelling Certainties
• Detours and Daydreams
• Karen Rubado

About Viv Davy

Viv Davy lives by the powerful Tasman Sea in Ōpunakē, Aotearoa New Zealand where she has created a studio and gallery space for fibre and textile arts. The vision of the project is to strengthen the knowledge and awareness of fibre arts in Aotearoa New Zealand. There is a public exhibition space for solo or group shows as well as an artist residency attached to the campus. Supporting and promoting local talent underpins the from out of the blue studio gallery project. This dream was formed after returning home from living many years in Canada, and having enjoyed the rich and diverse wealth and appreciation of textiles and the fibre arts there.

Tags

exhibition | New Zealand | textiles | weaving