Burke Residency 10: Debby Weiss

E: Your work has included traditional quilts, functional clothing, fiber structures, and two-dimensional pieces (such as your painted and stitched journal); I’d love to hear about your relationship with textiles and your approach to exploring all of its potentialities. 

D: My love has always been for textiles/fabric and my joy comes from using the different techniques I've acquired in my lifetime to make both pieces of function and beauty. I have a difficult time just working in a singular technique so I have allowed my mind and hands to wander and incorporate a variety of materials oftentimes into one piece and/or jumping from one medium to another in small collections, bodies of work. Over the last few years I was able to travel prior to covid, and my work turned towards the thoughts of what I would see while exploring. I mostly return to the thoughts of homes and gardens but not necessarily in a literal sense. My notion of what might be behind a window, a door, a wall. This year in self isolation that feeling was intensified and created a new meaning of home.

E: I’m struck by how varied your work is with regard to shape, size, and dimension. I’m curious to hear how (or if) you think about scale in your work. I’m thinking here too about how you create color, texture, abstract forms and images with thread while you also make similar gestures with pieces of fabric for your sculptures and larger wall hangings. Do you think of scale more in relation to the materials you work with, the space you envision them occupying, to the body?

D: I generally work smaller scale but I've focused this past year on using up all my scraps, in particular the ones left from making face masks. I never have a plan before I start. My work is created by pulling from what surrounds me and letting the piece tell me what it wants to become.

E: Could you talk to us about your use of scrap materials and the act of remaking anew?

D: I wouldn't say that the scrap is being remade, more that it is not wasted. As above it tells me how it wants to live.

E: The way you articulate your practice on your website is moving in its intimacy; I was particularly struck with the statement, “As we change and grow we remain ourselves only different, so does the fabric with each puncture of my needle.” It speaks poignantly to the relationship between time and physicality and I’m wondering if you could elaborate more on the connection you feel between the two. Has your perspective around time and the tactility of fabric changed at all in the unprecedented experiences that the pandemic continues to bring us?

D: My perspective has not changed but my practice has become much more prolific because of the pandemic. In the prior years I would collect experiences riding on public transportations among strangers, wandering cities, pulling so much inspiration from the grit of the world along with its beauty. This past year has left me drawing from memory. I reach deep inside and without cognitive thought let my hands and fiber create.

E: As we conclude, could share what has been bringing you joy or inspiration lately?

D: The hope for better times, I miss being embedded among strangers. I get joy from teaching on zoom which allows a temporary connection. I have recently started collaborating with others unknown to me except by instagram. It brings me joy and a challenge to work outside my comfort zone while interacting with their work and voice and to see what they do with mine.