Planet Texas 2050 Symposium: Khanh Weave

This Monday, I was able to join the Weaving Our World workshop hosted by Professor Kate Freer and Artist/Costume Professional Elizabeth Wislar. The workshop emphasized the often overlooked waste that we use every day: Clothes and fabric. Synthetic fabric with high concentrations of plastic is just like any other plastic and cannot be fully recycled or decomposed. Thus, we ought to reflect on our consumption behavior regarding clothing. Wislar underlines the importance of giving new life to trash, like how she would make larger than life structures of animals from scrap fabric to raise money for that animal conservation. Thus, during this event, we were asked to create, tear, and tie pieces of scrap trashed fabric to ropes to create new artwork and bring new life to these pieces of fabric.

With low stakes and no guidelines, the event became a safe space of limitless creative expression and communal sharing as we were encouraged to talk and debrief while making. This is one of the main reasons the event was so attractive to me as a participant compared to other panel speaking events; the notion of arts and crafts by itself just exudes excitement in me, the notion of play and the ability to become a solution right there allow the audience to directly contribute after learning about the gravity of textile waste to our environment. During the event, the audience can reflect and connect with others without the need for fancy technologies, just simple fabric and scissors. Unexpectedly, the activity spurred an effective environment for collaboration as my friend and I helped each other well as we worked with strangers in completing our art piece as a community regardless of age, gender or occupation.

This reaffirms our team idea of having a communal art-creating activity for participants where they use trash pieces to create a new piece of art together. This event inspired me to think of making the activity a station of sorts so people could spend more time creating and connecting to each other. Or if there are ways to encourage collaboration in our experience.