There’s something irresistible about the work of artist Kayla Mattes. Her bright, large-scale tapestries combine a folky, fuzzy 70s vibe with digital culture visuals — in particular, the user interfaces of the not-too-distant, yet already quaint-seeming past. “I’ve always been really interested in the naïvete of the old Internet,” she says. “How people were, for the first time, becoming familiar with actually using the Internet and building websites and doing it in this way that was very free — like people were okay with using bright pink text against purple backgrounds. Back then the web was so unleashed.” Things have gotten more sophisticated but also more staid, at least in terms of what’s considered smart design. Mattes’ tapestries are a kind of antidote to that, and to the disconnection and depersonalization that spending hours online can sometimes leave you feeling. Her work is plugged in to all the technology we take for granted but she recontextualizes it, slows it down, and the effect is immersive, dizzying, a little chaotic, and oddly comforting.
After graduating from RISD in 2011, with a BFA in textiles and the technical expertise gained from that program, Mattes was initially drawn towards design. She started a jewelry line and considered knitwear, but has since moved in a more conceptual direction. For the past year, she’s primarily been focused on making tapestries in her home studio in Portland, Oregon, where she landed a couple of years ago after a short stint in LA. “It’s a small city but I’m never bored here. And it’s such a beautiful place.“ She’s been able to work mostly full-time on her art while teaching some textile and weaving workshops at the WildCraft Studio School, an arts center in the stunningly scenic Columbia River Gorge.
The contrast between the natural beauty of her surroundings and her creative fixation on screen life has been a productive one. So has working in a medium that is both an ancient craft, and, with the invention of mechanical looms, a precursor to computing. “Part of the reason I use weaving for this subject matter is I definitely see parallels between digital references and the loom. There’s this mathematical process to weaving and there’s a grid that creates some limitations that in a lot of ways parallel the references I’m using.”
While Mattes is “excited about making the tapestries the main part” of her practice, she’d like to “be working more in other realms” too — including sculpture and installations. We’re eager to see where her process takes her, but also very happy to get a closer look at where she’s at now.
Mattes made this jacquard tapestry as an undergrad. “I was thinking a lot about AOL instant messenger and the new languages that developed from using that.” Also in this shot: postcards of past work, including a collaboration with Will Bryant and a jar of bouncy balls she collected by an old amusement park. “There’s a wildlife refuge path two blocks from my house, and it ends at this amusement park. You can hear people screaming on the roller coaster as you walk through the forest.”
On our visit, we caught this work-in-progress which has since been completed and displayed as part of “Over Spun,” an exhibition at the online gallery Mist. Mattes’ use of color is both intuitive and intentional. “Even though I have hundreds of yarns, I know each yarn and know each color, so I know what’s possible,” she says, and she’s deliberate about how she arranges “pockets of certain color schemes.”
Mattes started this piece “thinking simply about squares, working squares into squares, finding a relationship between them” and then eventually worked in more digital references. She currently uses two large looms, including a 1970s vertical loom, meant for tapestries, that she was lucky enough to find at a textile center in Eugene, Oregon. For smaller woven pieces, she tends to use basic frames.
In 2014, at a residency at Little Paper Planes in San Francisco. Mattes explored the subject of pizza and our weirdly strong feelings about it. “I asked people to write down any kind of pizza memory or association.” That turned into an artist’s book and an installation, “Cheesy Rituals” featuring large, woven pizza slices. Since then, she’s been making and selling these smaller slices. “It’s cool to make an accessible piece that people can get. It’s evolved into a big, ongoing pizza scheme.”
Mattes makes the slices to order — “you can tell me what toppings you want” — and jokes about creating a webshop “that’s almost like the Domino’s Tracker, where people can see what state their pizza’s in.” She plans to keep making them, but she’s also “interested in creating some other small-scale object weavings that aren’t necessarily pizza.”
Mattes lives a few minutes away from the Pendleton Woolen Mill Store, which stocks fabric and yarn along with various scraps. “You can find some pretty cool stuff you can get by the pound. I found this selvage waste that already had this fringed effect. And when I used it to weave, I realized I could get this really dense unique texture that was difficult to do in other ways.”
Mattes likes to have a wide array of colors at her disposal and typically uses wool and cotton yarns that she sources from several Portland shops, including Scrap, a creative reuse center. The yarn on these cones (above) is very thin and mostly gets used in smaller sections of her work.
A bookcase filled with “any random things I will need in my studio time,” says Mattes: textile dyes, paints, Magic-Sculpt, fasteners used for jewelry, an iron to steam finished pieces. Lately she’s been painting when she needs a break from weaving.
Mattes collects busts like this one she found at a yard sale. “I have a fascination with sculptural heads, even though I don’t really work figuratively. I haven’t figured out why, but I really like having that head in my studio.” To the right is one of her first large-scale tapestries. Larger pieces are “a little more difficult to control,” she says, “but I wanted to go bigger. There’s this aspect of looking at the pieces and getting lost in chaotic situations. I thought that would make sense to see on a larger scale.”
A cheery corner in Matte’s live-work space. Her boyfriend, Justin Seibert, made these two sculptures of plastic plants in resin. And the little green creature was cast by a friend, Jeremy Klemundt.
This smiley-face print, above these thrifted ceramic finds and a little local fern, is by Mattes’ friend, Los Angeles based artist Ryan McIntosh. “He did a series of these plastic bags with different images, around the time they were getting rid of plastic bags in LA.”
An older piece Mattes made as a kind of compositional study. “I was thinking about arranging these shapes and objects in a way that was almost creating camouflage, trying to align certain objects in ways that would get concealed, and hidden within each other. I was looking at a lot of I Spy books.” On her process: “With most of my weavings, I don’t really plan it out beforehand. As I weave one thing, I draw associations with that object to the next object, it’s a process of working upwards.”
Mattes found this vintage macramé piece in a thrift shop. She doesn’t necessarily go searching for this stuff, but “if it’s there, it definitely will draw my eye.” Not too long ago, at Scrap, she came across a copy of Step-by-Step Graphics, a magazine from the 80s and 90s. She’s since started collecting them for inspiration. “They’ve got all these amazing ads you’d never see today for things like computers, different graphic tools, very old Photoshop ads, things like that. I eventually want to own every copy.”
Mattes’ method of presenting her tapestries has changed a bit over time: “Lately I haven’t been attaching rods like this to my pieces. I came up with this other way of tying back the ends and hanging it so they’re actually like rectangles without any fringe or support.” She’s currently gearing up for solo shows at PLY space in the UK and at FISK gallery in Portland.
Mattes moved around as a kid but spent most of her time growing up on Long Island, which is where she picked up the tiger textile at a thrift shop. “There was also a zebra that I opted not to get and kind of regret.” It hangs by a papier-maché Halloween mask her boyfriend made and one of the many plants that fill her Portland home.
There are few people who get the opportunity to uproot, relocate, and be instantaneously welcomed by a community of powerful and creative women. But Maryanne Moodie — the Melbourne, Australia native who settled in Brooklyn last year after her husband got a job a Etsy — did just that. Since arriving, she says, “I’ve been able to meet and forge fast friendships with so many amazing textile ladies — inspirational women who are creative as well as business focused. I’ve had the chance to collaborate professionally with them — as well as down a few glasses of wine over plans for world domination.”
Antwerp’s Irene Alvarez was a sculptor and recent Royal Academy art grad when she got the call from the cult concept shop Ra — the city’s version of Opening Ceremony — asking her to design a custom installation. But it was the far less glamorous moment that came next that has since marked a pivotal moment in her nascent career: She discovered the Netherlands' Textile Museum Tilburg, which is not only a museum but also an experimental production lab where creatives can apply for technical assistance on machines capable of knitting, embroidering, lasering, printing, tufting, dyeing, and weaving almost anything the mind can conceive. Despite having no previous experience with textiles, she collaborated with the museum on the half-woven Inti Altar sculpture that’s held court on Ra’s second floor for the last two years, and she’s been addicted to the furry medium ever since. Today marks the opening of her first solo show, at Belgium’s other hallowed retail emporium, Hunting and Collecting, and it demonstrates just how far Alvarez has come in her obsession with knits — it contains no traditional sculpture at all, only a textile teepee (above), a line of t-shirts, and a series of three tapestries woven with a psychedelic clash of pop-culture icons and op-art patterning. Sight Unseen recently spoke with the artist about her work with the museum and the ethnic influences behind her imagery.
In the parallel universe of false starts, where every cabinet is filled with tools you’ll never use again and every heart with ideas that didn’t stick, artist Christy Matson is a welcome presence, a reminder that sometimes lost things have a way of finding you again. Matson bought her first loom before she’d ever woven, certain that she would take immediately to the repetition and logic of it: “I was, like, I’m going to love weaving, I just know it! I had never met a textile-related process I didn't like,” Matson says. “And then I took a weaving class the next semester and hated it. I thought, this is it? This is boring.”
