Soft Structures

About

Anni Albers famously referred to textile as the “pliable plane,” the raw material of shelter and garment. She grappled with textile as a building material that is simultaneously strong and yielding, and resisted the sissy1 domesticity of craft. Each of the works in Soft Structures is at once flexible and architectural. The technical requirements of making become the aesthetic of the things themselves: the repetition of a stitch; the tension across the bias of a vintage knit, the transparency of a loose weave or a woven plastic. The artists in Soft Structures are centered as engineers and architects; utilizing hard logic and technical maneuvers to build soft objects. In this context, the textile becomes more than a conveyor of color, memory or meaning. With haptic fluency and keen knowledge of technique and tradition, these artists work in dialogue with the textile systems themselves and, in doing so, give us a dignified lens through which to understand them.