Soft Meaning: Weaving, Knitting, and Felting

with Abbey Muza
FIBER 632 001 | 3 credits | $100 lab fee
In-Person: January 5–18, 2025
Every day during the session (including weekends) 9:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m EST

In this course, students will make fiber-based work while developing an understanding of how the materials we use create and hold meaning. Focusing on the sustainable material; wool, students will explore a variety of treatments to create yarn, felt, cloth, and sculpture. We will build D.I.Y. handheld looms for our spun yarn, design flat works, explore dyeing, felting, and simple knitting techniques in the service of making soft works, as designed by the students. We will look at how the specific materials and techniques we use influence how we think about and create meaning in our work in relation to histories, cultures, and ecologies. Course readings and lectures will deeply consider how we can think about materials from various perspectives, and will include artists such as Ektor Garcia, Hana Miletić, and Cecilia Vicuña, and texts by authors including T’ai Smith and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Assignments will guide students through processing a locally sourced sheep’s fleece and learning the rudimentary techniques of spinning, weaving, knitting, and felting, using this fleece and other fiber materials, including sourced and foraged materials from Ox-Bow’s campus. After learning a variety of techniques and conducting initial material experiments, students will make final works (which may take any form) that engage thoughtful and personal consideration of materials and their meanings.

Abbey Muza, L: Divine and Darling, R: Inversions devient Urania, 2022, silk, wool, cotton, organza, enamel, wood,L: 67 x 26 in.; R: 82 x 26 in.

Abbey Muza uses weaving and other forms of image-making to explore narration, identity, image-making, and abstraction. They are interested in the specificities inherent in textile objects - for example, how image and content can be imbued into a textile, or the uniqueness of a textile object’s relationship to ways of seeing and being in the world. They have been an artist in residence at ACRE and Alternative Worksite, and have been a Fulbright France Harriet-Hale Wooley Awardee, a Leroy Neiman Fellow at the Oxbow School of Art, and a visiting artist at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. They have shown their work in solo and two-person shows at spaces including Tusk, Slow Dance, and the Fondation des États Unis. They have a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture.