Negotiated Desires

The materials and colors combined in these tapestries carry through an essence from the High Desert of West Texas, once felt by me, into the physical realm. Weaving acts as a translator for a feeling into an object of notation, linking past with present through one long intimate and infinite moment, not adhered to time. Summer in the High Desert doesn't seem to adhere to time either and it gives you two days in one when you time it right. It leaves you longing for that first sliver of night when the sun breaks on you for a bit so your breath can sink deeper and your eyes can steer upward for longer.

Rain Sang
2020
Texas cotton, dirt
Courtesy of Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe

Cottonwood Winds, for Travi
2021
Paper, Texas cotton, dye, dirt
Courtesy of Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe

My recent tapestries made during the summer of 2020 serve as an artifact of feelings formed from disant desert blues, late August meteor showers and summer shade. Meticulous ways of working within the studio serve as one way for the artist to re-harmonize dissonance. Seeing the process as such allows these woven paintings and hangings to serve as notations of moments past.

My work is bound through an intersection of skilled tradition in a contemporary dialog between materials, memory and self. Interested in perception and deception, I play with contradicting the nature of materials. What floats through the work is a sense of ethereal, allegorical, philosophical tendencies that are not grounded in reality of the present.

Elizabeth Hohimer is an artist from Texas, born in 1991, who had been living in Marfa, Texas, and now in Taos, New Mexico. She received her BFA in Textiles from the California College of the Arts in 2016. Weaving and other traditional textile processes are used within her more recent site-specific, land-based bodies of work.

Photo by Katy Shane