It was a couple of years ago that Chicago-based artist Samantha Bittman first captivated us with her intricate, meticulous paintings on woven textiles. We’ve been transfixed by her work ever since, so when we had the chance recently to visit her studio and delve into her process, we jumped. Bittman creates dazzling surfaces of optically challenging patterns that draw you in to reveal greater depths, dimensionality, and unsteadying shifts in perspective. There’s an objective, mathematical precision to her pieces but there’s also a remarkably human warmth — the result, perhaps, of giving in to the parameters created by the loom while also resisting them. “Every time I set up the loom,” says Bittman, “I feel like it’s an algorithm or a program and the act of weaving it ends up generating a piece of cloth that is the output of the algorithm.” At the same time, because she typically works with a grid and geometric shapes, she’s constantly “trying to think of ways to push against the limitations of what shapes are available or the grid itself and trying to keep those things interesting for me. I like working within a narrower space but pushing against what that might be.”
Bittman has “always been attracted to pattern,” and she first got into the complexities of weaving as an undergrad at RISD. She’d planned to focus on painting until a teaching assistant in the textiles department introduced her to the medium. “I didn’t know the difference between weaving and knitting. Everybody’s familiar with textiles because they’re so ubiquitous but I hadn’t given them too much thought.” Once she did, though, the draw was “immediate.” She spent a few years after college working in commercial textiles before returning to Chicago in 2008 — she grew up outside the city — to pursue an MFA in painting at the School of the Art Institute. Post-studies, she’s divided her time between various residencies, teaching at both of her alma maters, and steadily focusing on her practice in the studio.
“Weaving is so infinite, there’s always going to be something new to try or new types of pictures to make,” she says. But she doesn’t want to “settle into any type of mode” or be pigeonholed as someone “who just makes these painted handwoven textiles. What I’m interested in is, I hope, larger than that.” We didn’t need much convincing when she showed us the tile sculptures, embroidery, and wallpaper she’s been coming up with. Even as she moves in different directions, her approach remains coherent throughout. As she puts it, “in my work the graphics and the images are made up of an accumulation of parts and you can always see the totality and the parts at the same time.” We loved getting a closer look and hearing her thoughtful take on all of it.
“I think about perception a lot. When I start a painting, I usually have an idea in mind, an event that I want to occur. I want the painting to behave in this way, I want the viewer to see this first, this second, and this third the longer they look at it. Building that layering has to do with being aware of what your eye’s going to pick up on first and second and third. But it can also be an effect of proximity: This is going to look a certain way from a certain vantage point, far versus close, straight on versus from the side.”
Binary pairs run through Bittman’s work. “Weaving is automatically a set of binary pairs, the way the cloth is constructed, the warp or the weft is always going to be on top for each pixel area or yarn interlacement.” And there’s the binary of the black and white color direction that she often uses. “Black and white works as the best camouflage for marrying the painted portions to the textile surface because it’s so high contrast that your eye picks up on the black and white contrast before it picks up on the material contrast.”
Once the textile is woven, Bittman preps it to be nonporous and then applies acrylic paints on top in a process that is often painstaking.
A finished work. “The painting here is just copying what’s underneath… it’s pure pattern but it’s also suggesting that the pattern is coming from the support of the painting itself, the support being the textile.” While this method minimizes decision making when it comes to painting, it doesn’t cut down on time-intensiveness. The pink triangle alone took two days to complete.
When we dropped by, Bittman was testing out arrangements of tiles for an upcoming show. She thinks of these “as textile sculptures. I always get frustrated with the textiles, because the scale of textiles is generally pretty small. Unless you’re a textile person, you’re not going to examine the structure or break down how it was made. So these are enlargements of that.”
The tiles provide a freeing counterpoint to the parameters Bittman faces with the loom. “I like that they’re loose and the piece comes together through arrangement and they can be disassembled and reassembled in different configurations. I think of information a lot in that way too. Out of context, one piece of information on its own doesn’t have much meaning until it’s arranged in a particular scenario.”
Bittman made these tiles during her residency at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art in 2013. She spray-painted sheets of MDF before cutting them down into 2×2 inch pieces. While they’re “super basic,” she’s still “interested in the craftsmanship of these things, the labor of making of them.”
Bittman cites Sol LeWitt as a big influence. It goes beyond the familial resemblance evident in her work and into LeWitt’s “idea that a set of instructions can generate art work” and “that working conceptually and working formally aren’t necessarily two different things; they’re very much in tandem with each other. Weaving, essentially, is a set of instructions that generates pattern or a picture.”
Bittman also admires fiber artist Anni Albers, not only for her output, but also for her interest in pre-Columbian textile traditions that centered on “the structure of the textile and letting the patterns emerge from the process of making.” To notice the way Albers paid attention to “those different modes of approaching weaving, was an important point for me as an artist, for how I think of my approach to making an object or making a picture.” The way structure generates pattern is one of Bittman’s core interests in weaving.
To the left of this painting are gradations Bittman made in Photoshop while working on embroideries in a similar vein. “I’m interested in how something that appears like a smooth gradation becomes broken down into concrete parts. In those examples I’m just using Photoshop as a tool to make that jump. In the embroideries I did, I came up with my own system of doing that by hand.”
One appeal of the embroideries is “that they are portable pieces that I can work on, if I’m travelling or at a friend’s house or just sitting kind of burnt out.” This series has “to do with pattern-making and the structure of pattern-making. There’s a lot of counting at the root of textile making. In these I was interested in numbers becoming the pictorial aspect in the thing that makes the image of the pattern as well.”
Last fall, for shows at the Andrew Rafacz gallery in Chicago and Longhouse Projects in New York, Bittman experimented with using semi-permanent wallpaper as a backdrop for her paintings. The sample above, though, is “just a test for scale” in relation to this painting she displayed in a group show at Chicago’s Roots and Culture in February.
“What I’ve learned about making the textiles is that they could be much more complicated than I make them but they don’t need to do everything on their own because they’re going to interact with the painted surface.”
Bittman uses this four-harness floor loom in her studio and has also worked on eight-harness looms. “The number of harnesses will allow for more complex patterns.” Once she goes to the loom, there’s a little room for improvisation — “as planned as I want to be there are always surprises “ — and she can make minor pattern changes, “but it’s kind of locked into a particular look or stylization.”
How long does it typically take to weave a piece? “The weaving goes relatively fast, the painting goes much slower. When I weave, to set up the loom takes between half a day and a day. Using the yarn that I use, to spend between 4-8 hours as a set up is not that long compared to what it could potentially be. Then I can weave at least two medium sized pieces in a day. I always have a backlog of available textiles to use.”
Bittman most often weaves with mercerized cotton yarn. “I’ll get the fattest yarn available because it will give me the biggest line. And then I might weave in other yarns too but that particular yarn works really well, weaves really quickly, it’s moderately priced, and it absorbs paint well. Cotton and linen work well. More synthetic yarns or wool or animal fibers don’t work so nicely for water based painting.”
“The largest weaving width that I have on my loom is 36 inches, so I can only make a piece in a particular size, but I think there’s a really important relationship between the patterning of the textile and the total size of the painting. I’m not interested in making huge works because I think it loses the intimacy, and the pattern of the textile starts to become more of an allover texture. Whereas when it’s smaller, it reads more as a graphic mark or a line. I want the patterns to be repeating just enough and then to cut it off. To suggest repetition but not to be redundant.”
A Weaver’s Book of 8-Shaft Patterns edited by Carol Strickler. “This book is great. I used it in my advanced hand weaving class as an undergraduate and I use it now to teach weaving.” Bittman admits that “out of all of the types of weave structures available, I use such a narrow range.”
A collection of old textiles and abandoned works Bittman keeps around for re-use and inspiration. “A lot of times, works are based on previous things that I’ve made or ideas will come out of the process, accidents that I’ll go back to and exploit for a further piece.”
For the past couple of years, Bittman has worked out of this studio in a warehouse space she shares with other artists. It’s not too far from her home in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood.
She’s currently preparing for upcoming solo shows this spring and summer at Johansson Projects in Oakland, CA, and at the David B. Smith Gallery in Denver. She’ll also be returning to the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine for a residency in June.
In the parallel universe of false starts, where every cabinet is filled with tools you’ll never use again and every heart with ideas that didn’t stick, artist Christy Matson is a welcome presence, a reminder that sometimes lost things have a way of finding you again. Matson bought her first loom before she’d ever woven, certain that she would take immediately to the repetition and logic of it: “I was, like, I’m going to love weaving, I just know it! I had never met a textile-related process I didn't like,” Matson says. “And then I took a weaving class the next semester and hated it. I thought, this is it? This is boring.”
There are few people who get the opportunity to uproot, relocate, and be instantaneously welcomed by a community of powerful and creative women. But Maryanne Moodie — the Melbourne, Australia native who settled in Brooklyn last year after her husband got a job a Etsy — did just that. Since arriving, she says, “I’ve been able to meet and forge fast friendships with so many amazing textile ladies — inspirational women who are creative as well as business focused. I’ve had the chance to collaborate professionally with them — as well as down a few glasses of wine over plans for world domination.”
“Being a photographer and being an artist working with materials like resin, plants, and glass — those two worlds should not really mix,” says Heidi Norton. “You have the camera and you have film and you’re trying to keep things clean and archival, and then you have dirt and glass shards everywhere.” Such contradictions are at the core of Norton’s work, from the immaculate glow of her photography to the dirt-under-your-fingernails feel of her sculptural pieces, which typically feature houseplants in some form or another.
