Weaving Language I: Lexicon
edited by Francesca Capone
with contributions by AMARANTH BORSUK, ADJUA GARGI NZINGA GREAVES, IMANI ELIZABETH JACKSON, ALLISON PARRISH, KIT SCHLUTER, MARTHA TUTTLE and SARAH ZAPATA
Weaving Language I: Lexicon is the first book in the Weaving Language series, which examines the poetics of weaving traditions through historical research as well as contemporary practices. Attempting to dismantle and rebuild commonplace understandings of the history of writing, Weaving Language focuses on fiber-based forms as a longstanding but often overlooked medium for record-keeping, storytelling, and poetry.
In Weaving Language I: Lexicon, weaving processes are mapped onto English grammar to suggest a method for reading woven works. Offering visual vocabularies as both discrete concrete poems as well as a collection of translatable terms, this book invites readers, writers, and weavers to participate by considering weaving as a system that can be decoded. Textile forms are broken into the basic building blocks of language, presented as a visual/textual lexicon.
Weaving Language I: Lexicon was initially self-published by Capone in 2012 and in 2015 re-issued in an edition of five as an artists’ book, which was awarded the Frances Mason Harris ’26 Prize from Brown University.
Essay Press’s edition makes this important work available for the first time in a trade edition. The edition has also been newly edited and significantly expanded into a multivocal work that represents the contributions of a small collective of artists including Martha Tuttle, Allison Parrish, Sarah Zapata, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Amaranth Borsuk, and Imani Elizabeth Jackson, thanks to funding from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Ford Family Foundation. The book also includes an afterword by Kit Schluter and diagrams by Anni Albers (with permissions from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation).
Plans are underway to similarly expand and reissue the two additional books in the series both previously published in limited editions currently out of print: Weaving Language II: Language is Image, Paper, Code, & Cloth (information as material, York, UK, 2018) and Weaving Language III: Writing in Threads (Center of Craft, Asheville, NC, 2017). The Weaving Language project has been accompanied by numerous gallery shows, including “Material Memory,” a show running from October 7 through November 9, 2022, at Nationale in Portland, Oregon, to accompany the release of the Essay Press edition of Weaving Language I.
Artists’ books from the Weaving Language series are held by the collections of the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, NY; the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY; the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays at the John Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, RI; and at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL.
Awarded the Frances Mason Harris ‘26 Prize from Brown University in 2015:
“Weaving Language I: Lexicon is a strange and intriguing way to cross the mute and the written into a dialogue of akin and unmaking a weaving, a grammar and vocabulary with it’s own rules of order by association. Not synesthesia but a stimulation of relations heretofore overlooked or even non-existent. A silent background of color and pattern aligned with a torrent of words brought into the same locale to make a beautiful, uncanny object.”
— Prize Committee, Literary Arts at Brown University
“Weaving Language probes the relation of lines of thread with lines of text and posits a metaphorical synthesis of the two. A beautiful and intriguing book.”
— Rosmarie Waldrop
“Francesca Capone has assembled a beautifully-made tool kit for many of us to pause and go further when we hear, “weaving is like writing.” Weaving Language: Lexicon actually dismisses the simile and goes straight into the thick of how it is that work with thread and color is a language, a grammar, and a way of expressing, being, and knowing. The argument is not that we should recover this way, but that it has always been here for us, in us, around us. This is a book meant to be studied—such a necessary text to push out the boundaries of poetics and textile studies, both!”
— Jill Magi
PUBLICATION DETAILS:
ISBN: 9781734498462
Publication date: 9-30-2022
First trade edition
FRANCESCA CAPONE is a visual artist, writer, and materials designer, and she often works between these three mediums. Her work is primarily concerned with the creation of materials and a poetic consideration of their meaning. She is interested in how tactile forms simultaneously serve as functional surfaces for daily life and as a mode of communication or symbol within the cultural paradigm. Her books Woven Places (Some Other Books, New York, NY, 2018), Weaving Language II: Language is Image, Paper, Code, & Cloth (information as material, York, UK, 2018), Weaving Language III: Writing in Threads (Center of Craft, Asheville, NC, 2017), and Text means Tissue (self-published, Portland, OR, 2017), focus on textile poetics. They have been distributed via Printed Matter, New York, NY, and are in the collections of the MoMA Library and the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work has been included in The New Concrete, Survey of Concrete Poetry in the Digital Age, from Hayward Press, UK, 2015. More of her written work has been published in collections by OEI Press from Stockholm, MIT Press, SF MoMA Open Space, Gauss PDF (San Francisco), Tunica Magazine (NY), and Stonecutter (NY). She has exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery in London, LUMA/Westbau in Switzerland, Textile Arts Center in NYC, and 99¢ Plus Gallery in Brooklyn. She has been an artist in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West. Her academic work includes lectures and workshops at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Reed College, Lewis and Clark College, the University of Washington, and Alberta College of Art and Design, among others. She is represented by Nationale, Portland, US.