Orange and white striped dish towels hanging on a white wall.

Rhumb Lines

They wrapped themselves to create a somewhat unremarkable container. They were scattered; everything they knew was scattered, everything they owned was scattered, a function () undefined. All was left was hundreds of data points, linked together like weft and warp on the map of fabric, an elusive sensorial and emotional experience with no meaning to anyone but them.

Year: 2019

Materials: Mercerized cotton.

Dimensions: 25 pieces, each 8” x 10”

Multiple small, folded, orange and white striped paper pieces arranged in a grid pattern on a white background.

The work translates Facebook group membership data into hand-woven ikat-dyed textiles. Data points here become thread-binding instructions, creating abstract linear patterns that chart movement through the fabric surface. The encoded fabrics remain unreadable to viewers, functioning as private cartography.

An orange and white patterned towel hanging on a wall hook.
Close-up photograph of a textured orange fabric with a woven pattern.
  • A spreadsheet showing a list of names across the left side, with columns representing different cities in Colombia, such as Bogotá, Cali, Bucaramanga, Medellín, and others. The cells contain X marks indicating locations associated with each individual.
  • A detailed spreadsheet or chart with columns representing various cities in South America, containing numerical and checkmark data entries.
  • Vertical white strips with colored strings tied to them, hanging in front of an autism awareness puzzle piece wall.
  • A person wearing a yellow rubber glove immerses a batch of tangled red yarn into a container filled with red dye.
  • Close-up of a woven textile with white, orange, and brown threads, some of which are frayed or loose.
  • Close-up of red and white embroidery threads arranged vertically on fabric.
  • Close-up of multiple orange and yellow strands of yarn or thread, knotted and hanging from a wooden rack.
  • Close-up of three large skeins of multicolored yarn in shades of orange, yellow, purple, and pink hanging on a wooden loom, ready for weaving.
  • Close-up of a woven textile with red, white, and beige stripes and patterns, possibly part of a curtain or fabric upholstery.
  • A loom weaving a textile with orange and white patterns.

To create this work I Joined 82 Venezuelan Facebook groups and collected membership data across the different groups. I then created a database tracking which members belonged to multiple groups, and analyzing patterns of affiliation to identify 25 key groups with high interconnectedness. This data was organized into a spreadsheet that became binding instructions for the ikat dyeing process. Each data point corresponded to specific thread positions, determining where threads would be tied before dyeing. The bound threads were then dyed with tangerine-colored pigment and woven in sequence according to the original data structure.