Samantha Bittman constructs hypnotically patterned hand-woven textiles to create a rich dialogue between handmade and digital production. Bound by the physical parameters of her 12-harness floor loom, she weaves, by hand, a graphically driven pattern, which is then stretched over a traditional wooden frame before embellishing each thread with acrylic paint. She highlights the way binary data was stored in punch cards to weave intricate patterning in early jacquard weaving, and how these influenced the development of early computing and coding, and by extension complicates and undermines persistent binaries in our understanding of creativities and innovations that are typically encoded with gendered biases.

(Written by Carlyn Wilder, Associate Curator, 2024)