Tali Weinberg

Lives and works in Champaign, IL, USA

Artist statement

I use intimate hand processes of weaving, dyeing, and coiling to explore loss, care, and possibility within the context of intertwined climate, biodiversity, and health crises. Made from plant-, insect-, and petrochemical-derived materials, the resulting textiles and fiber-based sculptures embody relationships between extraction, rising temperatures, species loss, pollution, and illness. These works simultaneously reference landscape and body, often sharing qualities with textiles for grieving and care, such as shrouds, burial flags, and hospital gauze. Through weaving’s intersecting systems and structures, I merge scientific research with lived experience, record keeping with grieving, and handcraft with digital tools to retrace and reimagine relationships between corporeal and ecological bodies. Many recent works look to forests and watersheds as vital elements of our knowledge systems, immune systems, climate systems, and circulatory systems. Like us, they are harmed by the fossil fuel and chemical-intensive systems we live within. I photograph endangered tree species, tracing and weaving their silhouettes into porous plant-plastic forms that recall lungs, arteries, and roots. I also transform expired plastic medical materials once intended to support human circulatory systems into sculptures that evoke circulatory systems from the more-than-human world: tourniquets become tree rings and feeding tubes become river basins. The decade-long Datascapes project has evolved...

Artwork