Systems & Mythologies catalog essay
Thinking and Weaving: Barrow Parke’s Systems and Mythologies
Robert R. Shane
Weaving is a way of thinking for artist duo Mark Barrow and Sarah Parke. The subject matter of their collaborative textile-paintings is encyclopedic, covering topics from world creation myths to computer science to the cosmos, but their work always centers on the craft of weaving: its history, logic, mathematics, and systems, and its intuitive, visual, and tactile qualities. In dialogue with modern and contemporary art, Barrow Parke’s work challenges the privileged status that painting has held over weaving by painting handwoven fabric in ways that follow the paths made by the threads or that playfully mask and reveal the structure of the bare weave. In Systems and Mythologies, Barrow Parke explore all these ideas through newly commissioned work and earlier series, which also offer insight into the development of their ideas and collaboration over the last 15 years. Additionally, artist-designed wallpaper and a translucent vinyl window installation extend their patterns beyond the borders of their textile-paintings into the University Art Museum’s space in ways that are as expansive as their thinking.
Weaving, which has been primarily a product of women’s labor, has played a fundamental role in the development of language and ideas throughout human history—and prehistory. Today, metaphors of weaving and of textiles in general are all around us: we speak of the fabric of life, a common thread running between ideas, people cut from the same cloth. You are now reading this “text”—a word that has its origin in “textile.” This is all to say, textiles and weaving form a conceptual architecture that we often do not notice, as scholar Virginia Postrel emphasizes in The Fabric of Civilization (Basic Books, 2020), a book frequently cited by Barrow Parke. Barrow Parke’s work brings the unsung role of weaving to the foreground and in turn uses the medium as a framework for thinking about systems, such as those in the sciences or anthropology.
Examples of this cross-disciplinary exploration are found in Barrow Parke’s latest works on the open L-shaped center walls of the museum. These include Shapes in Time (2022) from Barrow Parke’s ongoing series depicting trees and root systems. Against a sand-colored woven ground, we see a painted central tree trunk sprouting upward. The form of its swirling branches echoes in the sinuous embroidered lines of the clouds that curl into themselves. In the earth below, the tree’s sprawling roots are juxtaposed with a grid of painted numbers resembling computer code. The work conjures associations between natural root systems, “root directories”—the hierarchical file systems employed in computer science—and the numbered shafts and pedals of the eight-harness floor loom used to hand-weave the fabric itself. The multivalence here of the term “root” recalls the ideas in linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago, 1980), a text that has played an important role in Barrow Parke’s thinking. Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphors structure the way we think about our experiences of the world, providing both a framework and a limit to how we might conceive them. The metaphor of the root, for example, is central to thinking about computer systems as well as genealogical relationships, or family trees. Barrow Parke’s work demonstrates that weaving itself is a root or foundation for thinking in numerous other fields.
Adjacent to Shapes in Time hangs Fire of the Jaguar (2023), a work exploring the resonance between weaving and anthropological systems. It is inspired by anthropologist Terrence Turner’s posthumously published book of the same name (Hau Press, 2017). In these writings, Turner focuses on an Amazonian Kayapo myth of the origin of the use of a fire to cook, acquired by humans from jaguars. On the body of the crawling jaguar in Barrow Parke’s work, we see both embroidered and painted diagrams based on those Turner drew as part of his system for analyzing mythology. Turner’s specific references in these diagrams are no longer legible in Barrow Parke’s piece; instead, the artists emphasize their background structure—circles, lines, perpendicular axes. Analogously they bring the historical background role of weaving to the foreground. This conceptual reversal of foreground and background plays out visually in their work as a play of figure and ground. The jaguar, which appears to us as figure, is the negative shape of the bare weave revealed by the surrounding area of the composition which has been masked out with a thick layer of paint. This play is even more pronounced in the paper drawing iteration of Fire of the Jaguar (2022) on the reverse side of the same wall, in which the orange background is revealed through a jaguar-shaped window cut into the paper overlain on the surface.
Both Shapes in Time and Fire of the Jaguar hang on a wall covered in one of Barrow Parke’s two wallpaper designs for the exhibition. Against the pale yellow background, a brown and white pattern of simplified, graphic forms representing raindrops and noses repeat in different orientations. These are the essential elements from a Bagobo creation myth from the southern Philippines in which humans were initially created with noses turned upward. They nearly drowned during the first rain after which an accommodating god graciously inverted their noses. A simple change, like painting the individual threads of a weave, radically changes the structure of everything. The second wallpaper pattern extends on the wall perpendicular to the first, based this time on an Ainu (Hokkaido, Japan) myth of the creation of the world on the back of a fish. As the wallpapers expand across the museum walls, they seem to repeat their forms without beginning or end, like myths or weaving techniques passed from generation to generation and shared across cultures.
The Ainu pattern is featured in the works hung on its wall: Barrow Parke’s textile-painting and a gouache on paper painting both titled The Universe (2023). In the textile iteration, orange lines wind across the picture plane: searching, circumscribing forms, revealing openings, moving through and against the grid of the weave. In some places, the chevron textile pattern is submerged under a nearly opaque glaze of paint. The apt title suggests the works’ all-encompassing subject matter, drawing upon multiple myths and origins: the Bagobo noses reappear, as do the loom numbers seen in Shapes of Time, and in the bodies and fins of the fish swirling around the composition, we see tree branches, spider webs, a city of tiny buildings, and zodiac signs.
These zodiac motifs, as well as images of the solar system, recur throughout Barrow Parke’s work as they frequently explore the patterns of thinking that form mythological and scientific systems for understanding the cosmos. The ideas of The Universe are linked conceptually and visually to the solar system works on the museum’s back wall by the continuation of the Ainu wallpaper pattern. In the drawing and textile-painting iterations of Eccoci (2022)—Italian for “Here we are”—we see how myth is used as a way of understanding our place in the cosmos. The circular Copernican orbits and planet names are embroidered over painted patterns based on zodiac motifs set within arcs and ovals interlocking with the bare weave’s patterns. The celestial-themed work is complemented by twelve color drawings of zodiac signs hung in a constellation elsewhere in the exhibition, whose patterned motifs draw from several antique sources.
Below the celestial system on the surface of Eccoci lies another: a weave composed of red, green, and blue threads originally employed in Barrow Parke’s earlier RGB series (2014). In that series exploring visual systems, select red, green, and blue threads within a woven substrate are individually masked out in black paint, resulting in colors that are optically mixed, as with a television or computer monitor. Looking at the edges of these pieces, we see the saturated bare weave, evidence of a vibrant original substrate anterior to the paint on the surface. On the face of GRB4 (2014), pointed ovals and hourglass figure-eights are the shapes that emerge from the calculated blackening of certain areas. Stretched over a traditional painting stretcher, the hand-loomed linen gets pulled and distorted at moments, like wavy reception from the bygone era of analog over-the-air-television.
In addition to RGB systems, Barrow Parke have also explored CMYK, the commercial printing system using cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink on white paper, by weaving a substrate of cyan, magenta, and yellow, and at times white and black threads. In YMC7 (2014), individual yellow, magenta, and cyan threads are painted white. In MYCK3 (2015), several discrete patterns have been cut up and juxtaposed; the composition’s curved forms are a result of their stitched interfaces. YMCK13 (2014) explores the theme with a painted textile that is not stretched over a traditional canvas stretcher as with the others in the exhibition. These different approaches—stretched, unstretched, stitched—draw our attention to the fact that weaving is not just a visual system but a material system and a way of thinking with materials.
Opposite the RGB works is a related and newly commissioned site-specific window piece GRB5 (2023), a luminous translation of graph-paper weaving drafts into a grid of translucent red, green, blue, and black vinyl squares that look like stained glass. The work covers an arched bay of four floor-to-ceiling double windows. Earlier iterations of the draft pattern window vinyl projects were realized in New York, Brussels, Milan, and in a permanent installation at Cappella Cavassa, Saluzzo, Italy. GRB5’s color permeates the space, washing over the walls and floor and the viewer’s own body. Its visual similarity with stained glass also conjures associations with belief systems and mythologies in nuanced ways. The digital inflection of the vinyl window pixels, as well as the computer-generated patterned wallpaper, push up against the modernist architecture of the museum, designed in 1967 by Edward Durell Stone, but also complement it, drawing out its latent decorative and spiritual overtones.
A response and challenge to modernist aesthetics was also the impetus for Barrow Parke’s earliest collaborations (2008–11), which invert the hierarchy that has privileged painting over weaving by showing how the grid, so crucial to modern abstract painting, has always been inherent in the structure of the woven canvas. The acrylic painting on the hand-loomed linen in Barrow Parke’s works like AES (2011), VEN (2010), or Graft (2008) all explore geometric abstraction in a way that highlights not form for its own sake, but form as generated from within and as a result of the matrix of the weave. Four works on view by modernist and late modernist artists—Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin—were selected by Barrow Parke to underscore their dialogue with modernism that in turn informs all the ways they use weaving to think about the world in Systems and Mythologies.
The earliest work on view is PM (2006), a work completed by Mark Barrow alone that anticipates the subsequent and ongoing 15-year collaboration between him and Sarah Parke. Horizontal bands composed of lines traced in colored pencil along the surface of the canvas align with its threads, emphasizing that a painter’s canvas is first and foremost a textile, rather than a mere ground for painting. PM belongs to a dialogue with Agnes Martin’s lifetime exploration of pencil grids, hand drawn on canvas or paper, which stood in opposition to the hard-edge abstraction and industrial Minimalist aesthetic common among her peers.
From those early investigations of the painter’s canvas as a textile and grid, Mark Barrow and Sarah Parke’s collaboration has expanded to tell the story of weaving’s essential role in structuring the patterns of thought throughout civilization, as evidenced throughout Systems and Mythologies. But more than a retrospective look at weaving’s underappreciated history, their work expands weaving into new spaces: past the stretchers across which they are pulled outward, to scale walls with patterns translated from textiles into wallpaper and to illuminate the space we inhabit with vinyl pixels that break from the paper grids of weaving drafts. Weaving is a sensory and intellectual medium for Barrow Parke, a critical tool for pushing up against modernist legacies, engaging other systems, and rethinking mythologies present and past, reaching back in time while always reimagining weaving’s possible futures.
Robert R. Shane is Associate Curator at the University Art Museum, University at Albany.