Social Weavers (Philetairus Socius), is an ongoing, research-based project that engages various communities with the landscape as a place of common knowledge. For our collective, the influence of the landscape has been a powerful metaphor to collapse our physical distance and cultural difference, helping us to define our identity on the lands of California and India. Our experience and research of our home landscapes has also helped us to deeply see and begin to understand the important and urgent relationships we have to the natural world - we honor all as relational and our work as a path forward towards kinship. Through this process, we are collaborating with communities of hand-loom weavers, master dyers and textile artists in India to interpret the sky, land forms, water and forests in a series of woven sari's, created as wearable canvases to document cultural stories and histories of craft practitioners. In California we are working with artists, textile historians, environmenatists and craft communities to begin to create shared narratives about our collective lives in a changing world. Our materials are locally sourced from the landscapes we come from.
Social Weavers goal is to show how a collective creative processes can dissolves distances while still honoring difference, creating connection through creative experiences.
