Barrows Rotunda | Hopkins Center for the Arts | Dartmouth College
March 27 – April 14
Hayri Dortdivanlioglu
Threaded Ecologies presents a woven map translated from a collective mapping study carried out during the “Text+Textile+Technology” workshop 2026. During this week-long workshop, participants from across disciplines traced the ecology of weaving as a form of knowledge practice: embodied knowing, material agency, craft communities, tools and techniques, and the relationship between making and thinking.
The resulting map was dense, relational, and deliberately unresolved. Rather than resolving this complexity, the artwork carries it forward into material form, translated into threads, warped across a frame loom, and held in suspension. Like the conversations that produced it, Threaded Ecologies holds questions beyond answers, connections beyond conclusions. It invites viewers to encounter craft as an ecology of knowledge, produced through the entanglement of bodies, materials, tools, and environments.
Threaded Ecologies began as a cartographic study. During the Text + Textile + Technology workshop, participants pinned ideas onto index cards, gradually drawing them into constellations across the triad of Text, Textile, and Technology; a triangular field that continuously shifted and found new centers of gravity. Beginning as a diagram with these three terms at its vertices, the map expanded as participants added handwritten notes, textile samples, sketches, photographs, and woven objects wherever connections emerged.
In its second iteration, the map thickened into a dense relational field. Participants traced pathways through clusters of related ideas, following lines of association that converged, diverged, and crossed without resolving. These drawn lines were eventually replaced with actual thread, transforming the diagram into a materially entangled surface. Over five days, this accumulation reorganized into traces of four currents, icnlufing externalized knowledge, material, thought + body, and place, moving across the space as overlapping trajectories rather than discrete categories. The evolving map suggested that knowledge produced in the workshop did not organize itself into disciplines or hierarchies, but instead wove them into an interdisciplinary meshwork.
This relational topology was then drawn, stripped of its words, and reduced to the bare geometry of its movements. From that drawing, a weaving draft emerged: warp and weft inheriting the same crossings, the same moments of passage and return. This draft enabled the transformation of traces into threads. The piece, currently on the loom, continues this process, translating what began as a collective tracing of ideas into a threading that unfolds through thinking-through-making.
<interact> <move> <shift> <zoom in> <pan> <zoom out> <transfer> <order> <juxtapose> <drag> <repeat>
This woven map challenges the assumption that knowledge is simply transmitted from one individual to another through instruction. Instead, it presents knowledge as distributed, emerging through the interaction of bodies, tools, materials, and the relationships that bind them. The workshop becomes a site of collective making and thinking: a space where people, looms, thread, tools, and computers engage a shared problem.
In such a setting, knowledge does not belong to any single participant. It is produced together and held across the meshwork of elements that make the work possible. This mode of knowing resonates with craft epistemologies, where knowledge is not stored in a single text or mind, but lives within communities and unfolds across generations of makers, materials, tools, and places.
Collaborators: Alexander Cachine, Aminah Alkanderi, Anne Sullivan, Etta Sandry, Finn Goss, Hayri Dortdivanlioglu, Ishani Saraf, Jacqueline D. Wernimont, Kira Dominguez Hultgren, Michelle Charest, Nathalie Miebach, Pamela Wilson, Rebecca E. Biron, Tricia Treacy, Vernelle A. A. Noel.
Collective Explorations by Alexander Cachine, Aminah Alkanderi, Anne Sullivan, Etta Sandry, Finn Goss, Hayri Dortdivanlioglu, Ishani Saraf, Kira Dominguez Hultgren, Michelle Charest, Nathalie Miebach, Pamela Wilson, Vernelle A. A. Noel.
Plywood, yarn, synthetic thread, photography
4”x7.5” and 4”x4”
Woven samples
“Reflections, Material Making, Thinking alongside Fellow Participants:
I see the map we created going from a triangular-selvedge fabric to shed notation (in a multilayer fabric, shed notation tells you when layers cross from top to bottom on the loom):
Weaving creates situated contexts for how knowledge is encoded and passed along. Weaving is enmeshment.
Over the course of these four days I stepped into the shed. On a loom, the shed is a tunnel, a space that opens up when warp is lifted and lowered to allow a weft yarn to pass through, fill up and press into the warp. The shed is both a mechanism that drops information out - the shed literally casts out or sheds certain warp yarns - and a mechanism for passing and storing information - the collected weft or fill material that gets stored in the shed.
Speculatively, I wonder what happens if we change the way we shed information? If the loom is the basis for our present binary technologies, what does it look like if we cross 0 and 1 differently? What does that shed look like that drops and stores information differently? How does that shed change a culture, a community, a social fabric?”
KIRA DOMINGUEZ HULTGREN
Assistant Professor + Graduate Coordinator, Department of Fiber and Material Studies
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
I see the map we created going from a triangular-selvedge fabric to shed notation (in a multilayer fabric, shed notation tells you when layers cross from top to bottom on the loom):
Weaving creates situated contexts for how knowledge is encoded and passed along. Weaving is enmeshment.
Over the course of these four days I stepped into the shed. On a loom, the shed is a tunnel, a space that opens up when warp is lifted and lowered to allow a weft yarn to pass through, fill up and press into the warp. The shed is both a mechanism that drops information out - the shed literally casts out or sheds certain warp yarns - and a mechanism for passing and storing information - the collected weft or fill material that gets stored in the shed.
Speculatively, I wonder what happens if we change the way we shed information? If the loom is the basis for our present binary technologies, what does it look like if we cross 0 and 1 differently? What does that shed look like that drops and stores information differently? How does that shed change a culture, a community, a social fabric?”
KIRA DOMINGUEZ HULTGREN
Assistant Professor + Graduate Coordinator, Department of Fiber and Material Studies
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Anne Sullivan and Nathalie Miebach
Round reed, corrugated cardboard, zipties, and yarn
13”x13”x10”
Basketry
Aminah Alkanderi, Anne Sullivan, and Nathalie Miebach
Flat and round reed, corrugated cardboard, zipties, yarn, and raffia
12”x10”x10”
Basketry
Nathalie Miebach
Round reed and zipties
8”x8”x8”
9”x9”x9”
18”x18”x14”
Freeform basketry
Hayri Dortdivanlioglu
Yarn and round reed
9”x9”x24”
9”x9”x16”
Circular machine knit
Alexander Cachine
Yarn and sticks
8”x24”
Woven on backstrap loom
Nathalie Miebach
Flat reed
3”x3”x3”
6”x7”x8”
Hexagon basketry
“I had such an incredible time at the Threaded Ecologies workshop this year. It challenged me to think about familiar subjects—like weaving, fiber, and thread in unfamiliar ways: complicating data rather than elucidating it, engaging embodied wisdom, and attending to situated meaning. I learned new skills and worked in new media, including weaving new structures and even attempting spinning, while beginning to understand creation itself as a tool for thinking rather than simply a means of producing outcomes.
The way I, as a physics researcher, interface with craft is very different from the way an artist, designer, anthropologist, or architect does, yet all of our work intersects in surprising and unexpected places. Even asking a question like “how do you understand thread?” feels foreign to me. My instinct is to simplify; to break things down into idealized forms that make analysis possible. That is, in many ways, how a physicist can arrive at results, and it can also resemble certain artistic processes of abstraction. But this week I was confronted with a different mode of thinking: not abstracting in order to simplify and extract intrinsic meaning, but abstracting to complicate, to generate new meanings.
It was such a valuable opportunity to engage in rich dialogues across disciplines. Being able to gather with such an incredible group for a week was deeply inspiring. Everyone contributed a new insight, perspective, or direction; the group itself felt like an embodiment of the duality between abstraction and concreteness, a tension that becomes particularly sharp in relation to craft.”
ALEXANDER CACHINE
Ph.D. Candidate, Experimentalist, Matsumoto Research Group, School of Physics
Georgia Institute of Technology
The way I, as a physics researcher, interface with craft is very different from the way an artist, designer, anthropologist, or architect does, yet all of our work intersects in surprising and unexpected places. Even asking a question like “how do you understand thread?” feels foreign to me. My instinct is to simplify; to break things down into idealized forms that make analysis possible. That is, in many ways, how a physicist can arrive at results, and it can also resemble certain artistic processes of abstraction. But this week I was confronted with a different mode of thinking: not abstracting in order to simplify and extract intrinsic meaning, but abstracting to complicate, to generate new meanings.
It was such a valuable opportunity to engage in rich dialogues across disciplines. Being able to gather with such an incredible group for a week was deeply inspiring. Everyone contributed a new insight, perspective, or direction; the group itself felt like an embodiment of the duality between abstraction and concreteness, a tension that becomes particularly sharp in relation to craft.”
ALEXANDER CACHINE
Ph.D. Candidate, Experimentalist, Matsumoto Research Group, School of Physics
Georgia Institute of Technology
Mourad Boumlik
Round reed, zipties, and knitted cloth
10”x12”x12”
Free-form basketry and circular machine knit
Aminah Alkanderi, Anne Sullivan, and Nathalie Miebach
Round reed, zipties, yarn, wool roving, and loom parts
12”x10”x10”
Free-form basketry
Kira Dominguez Hultgren
Dovel, plywood, and yarn
10”x12”
12”x10”
12”x16”
Assembly
Pamela Wilson
Round reed, flax fibers, zipties, and woven ribbon
12”x10”x36”
Free-form basketry
Hayri Dortdivanlioglu
Round reed, wool threads, and cotton threads
16”x36”
Tapestry Weave