Known/Unknown

Zak foster

Interview by L. Valena

Let’s talk about your process. I would love to hear the whole thing. Can you start by telling me what you responded to?

It was an image of a burgundy background with some yellow and orange zigzags and some diamond shaped mirrors. My first reaction was it felt a little bit cosmic, almost like lonely cosmos, like we’re all kind of floating around out there. I decided I wanted to play with that idea and with the zigzag because for me that’s such a strong visual element. Since I’m a textile artist, of course, I naturally gravitate toward textiles, and what I like about that is it softened it for me a little bit. When I saw the original image, it hit me hard. You know, it was just like BAM! Big universe, no boundaries, we’re infinitely expanding in every direction! And I like something that says, “This is under control. This is a world we can understand.” So that’s why I started with softening it first by putting it in fabric.

Then I wanted to play with that zigzag. What I did was I sewed it down into a shape, so I confined it first into a larger circle, giving it some kind of boundary, form, knowability, approachability. After doing that, I wanted to take the zigzag up a notch because I did really like the zigzag element. To me, it was the light waves in the cosmos that I was feeling, you know? So I wanted to amp up the zigzag factor by folding that white shoestring cord that I had sewn down. You see in the stop motion video that I made that what was one giant zigzag becomes multiple zigzags as it folds in on itself.

I live in Brooklyn, but I took a trip home to North Carolina last week, and this made a perfectly portable project. I took the purple textile that I had and put it in a giant embroidery hoop, which also served a double purpose. One, it helped me sew the shoestring down, but two, it also gave me that circular frame that I needed that I could base a zigzag on. I had this cording that’s meant for shoestrings, and I used reclaimed denim thread from jeans that I salvaged from a previous project, and I just hand-sewed it down, so you see those really lovely hand stitches going in and out of the white shoestring and the purple textile itself.

Tell me about that purple textile. Is that something that you dyed yourself?

No, I didn’t. But one thing I really love about that particular piece is that it’s a type of weave called a shot cotton. That means the weave in the weft are two different colors when you look really closely. You can hold it up to your eye and really see the individual threads. You can see that the threads going in one direction are one color and the threads going in another direction are another color. It plays a trick on your eye. It gives you a nice depth, a nice richness of color. I chose that shade intentionally because the original was burgundy. I just wanted to take a step to the left on the color wheel a little bit, right? Or maybe it’s to the right. It’s been years, I don’t know. But I wanted to keep it adjacent to the original piece. You know, just kind of keeping a connection to the original piece that way.

So you sewed it down with this big, amazing embroidery hoop, and then what?

I was sitting in my backyard of my childhood home, among the mountain mint patch that I had planted when I was like 10 years old, just sewing away on my embroidery hoop. Then I brought it back to Brooklyn with me and I ironed it all out, because the embroidery hoop leaves its own indentation, which in and of itself is beautiful, but not what I wanted for this particular project. Then I started filming the stop motion video. I kind of did some reverse magic here. I started with it all laid out flat, and then worked my way fold-by-fold toward the big crumple that the video actually starts with. It’s a composite of, I believe, a dozen different photos. The video itself starts with the crumple and then it ends flat, and then it returns back to the crumple, and then goes flat again. To me, that mirrored what we think the cosmos is doing, the idea of the big bang and how eventually we will start contracting back into a core. Maybe that’s the way it’s always been. I don’t know; it’s a nice story. But that’s what I was thinking about as I was thinking about that stop motion animation.

Have you done much stop motion before?

Hmmm like three, so no. This is pretty new.

I love that. I love that you made that leap. You saw the zigzags and you wanted to kick it up a notch and bring in this movement. It’s a really really cool departure from the original. I love it.

Well, that’s what I also love about the Bait/Switch project. It is creative license to go in whatever direction you want to. I wanted to keep it a partnership and keep those elements from the original piece in there, but of course spin off in a new direction as well. And I felt like with this project I could do just that. I could make it whatever I wanted to be. So I appreciate that about the project.

How does this relate to the rest of your art?

Well, you know I work primarily textiles, so that’s the direct connection. I work a lot with reclaimed and repurposed materials. We see that in the thread choice that I use. The white shoestring cording actually has a connection with my mother, who is a calligraphist. Probably the earliest memory of art that I have is my mom sitting at the table with her, I don’t know what you’d call it, it was the kind of stand that sits at a 45-degree angle to the table, where she could write. Anyway, she came to visit me once in Brooklyn few years ago and after she left, I had this brand new idea for a project. It was taking that shoestring cording and doing what was reminiscent of calligraphy-style text on fabric and textiles. And ever since that initial project, I’ve always wanted to return to it, which I’ve gotten to do with Bait/Switch. So there’s a connection with my mom in there and her art.

How about this idea of the cosmos? Is that stuff that you think about a lot? How does that theme play out in your life?

Yeah, I think about the world, the cosmos, life, it’s all the same thing. I think about that quite a bit in my work. I work a lot with memory keeping, and I make a lot of memory quilts. People will give me clothing of a loved one and it might be for various occasions. Usually, it’s for a loved one who passed, but it could also be kids’ clothes and the kids are now grown up and going off to college and Mom wants them to have a quilt made of baby clothes to take with them. You know, it takes number of different forms, but I’m really interested in the idea of memory keeping. I feel like our stories are all part of the whole, part of the cosmos if you will. So to get them down in one way or another is really important to me as an artist. In that small way, I would say Bait/Switch connects with larger work that I’ve been doing thematically.

Cool, I love this idea of memory and the cosmos and it’s all part of the same thing.

Absolutely. It’s all connected.

Because we’re all, you know, writing our own reality every minute, right?

Every minute of the day! That’s exactly right.

Do you have any do you have any advice for someone else approaching this project for the first time?

I would say take advantage of the creative license that Bait/Switch gives you. I feel like, as a textile artist, so often I’m working toward a very particular end project. I’m making a quilt. Clothing. An art piece. But this project really could be anything! I think when I first started, it was originally just going to be an image of the zigzag in a circle. But then I thought, We could do something else with it. That’s when the stop-motion came into mind. So I would say if you’re doing this for the first time, see if you can do one thing and then take it one more step and see what happens.

Call Number: M34VA | M35FI.foUnti

Raised in rural North Carolina and now living in Brooklyn, New York, Zak Foster is a self-taught textile artist whose work draws on Southern textile traditions while incorporating found fabrics and natural dyes. He practices an approach to design that is intuitive and improvisational and he is drawn to preserving the stories of quilts and specializes in memory quilts. His work has been featured in various magazines, websites, and galleries. Learn more about his work in his monthly email, Motivation for the Maker, at www.zakfoster.com/newsletter.