Born in Minnesota, Caitlin Schmid is a weaver and an artist living in Somerville, MA. Her interest in shared attention in the digital age picks and pulls at questions of duration, performance, craft, experimentalism, ethics, and community rooted in her background in musicology and engaged scholarship. Since beginning her practice in multishaft weaving in 2019, she has zeroed in on double weave–two layers of cloth woven simultaneously on a single loom and (sometimes) interlaced–as her structure of choice. (The possibilities!) She’s enchanted by every part of the weaving process except the initial imperative to narrow down all of the free-floating ideas to just one, and she welcomes collaboration and conversation about global textile practices.
Artist statement
I’m interested in exploring how textiles can reframe the experience and possibilities of attention for both the artist and the viewer.
Created primarily in double weave on 8- and 16-shaft handlooms, each piece is a tiny world woven according to an internal set of constraints tied to materials (the loom, the thread), chance operations, and manipulation by the weaver. Each artwork is also an invitation to reconstruct the logic of that world, to untangle when and where the rules break down, and to imagine different outcomes for color, pattern, texture, use, or meaning.
As I’m weaving, I wonder: What is it that we value when we pay attention? When does lending our attention–an unwritten recipe of time and interest–alter the way we see the world? Can a commitment to shared attention (around art, cloth, a collection of questions) create community? How could we construct an attentional commons worth protecting?
Instagram: @schmidcr
images of work
