by It’s tempting to see it as a happy ending. In Diedrick Brackens’ Towards the greenest place on Earth, two black men in the artist’s signature silhouette throw one arm around each other’s waist while holding opposite ends of a broom. Perhaps they are about to perform the folk wedding ritual of jumping backwards over the broom or flying away on it like witches. One of four major textile works in the US artist’s first exhibition in Britain, Woven Stories, at the Holburne Museum in Bath, the accompanying pieces are slightly less idyllic: suggestively mythical tableaux with hints of violent ritual.
However, speaking to the artist via Zoom from his studio in Los Angeles, it becomes clear that the tender scene is at most a moment of reprieve. “This piece is obviously about love,” he says. “It’s such a stressful time right now. All the things that matter to me are in trouble: landscape, gender, race, ritual and spirituality that are not connected to a colonial past. But I still look for these things and dream about them.” The background of the fabric consists of multicolored threads that are somewhat reminiscent of abstract expressionist painting: shades of green mixed with steamy blue, glowing orange and yellow. It’s more heat haze than landscape, intangible, out of reach.
Bracken’s poetic, political work, which explores, among other things, his experience as a queer black man, has brought him attention as part of the new wave of identity-oriented American artists. His love of weaving is now accompanied by a recent upsurge in appreciation for textile art. He first discovered the medium as an art student in his home state of Texas in 2008, a year after the introduction of the iPhone and before the digital takeover of daily life would turn crafting into an act of cultural resistance. “It’s a sensory thing,” he says of these first encounters. “There’s the color and feel of the yarn. The loom has a quiet beauty and rhythm that truly makes you float in time.”
Related: Unravel review – a wonderfully excessively twisted show full of blood, pain and pleasure
With inspirations such as West African Kente cloth, European tapestries, Californian fiber arts pioneer Ed Rossbach and Norwegian Hannah Ryggen’s anti-fascist tapestries, Bracken has since developed a distinctive oeuvre. His work examines questions raised by lived experiences and how history, religion and lore continue to resonate. A concern in Woven Stories is the nature of victimization and violence, be it physical or spiritual, religious or secular. “You have to sacrifice something to get something else,” he says. “In order to create something in my own life, I have to make the time and commit to getting up at a certain hour every day. Through ritual you manifest a power, supernatural or otherwise.”
Bracken’s themes range between the everyday and the mythical, and he also knows how to emotionally pull us in different directions. With his sacrificial pig and a reference to the Bible parable, his weaving work “Spendthrift” moves between an act of celebration and slaughter. Typical of Bracken’s work is the story of the reclaimed, headstrong son, which resonates with his own experiences as he left his home state and pursued a different career path than his family. “You can come from one place and feel outside of it,” says the artist. “I would never want to go deer hunting, for example.” His work is based on this popular Texas pastime in which a young buck is hung and a red human outline is superimposed over it, like a ghost or a memory, which portends terrible effects to others ways in which our aggression has manifested itself.
Bracken says he uses animals as stand-ins for people’s emotions and interactions, citing the moment in a movie you’ve seen on repeat a hundred times where a deer killed on the road portends impending disaster. “We all have darker tendencies that we have to negotiate within ourselves,” he says. “The utopian image with the figures on the broom does not necessarily reflect the course of life.”
Fruits of the loom: three works from the exhibition
Towards the greenest place on earth, 2023
Bracken first developed his signature silhouette shape after an art school assignment to create a self-portrait inspired by Hope, Shepard Fairey’s iconic poster of Barack Obama. Bracken began experimenting with the removal of his recognizable facial details and later found creative kinship with other black artists who used silhouettes, such as leading American Kara Walker and Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón. “I use the black surface to think about the psychological and the racial at the same time,” he says.
If you have ghosts, 2024
For Bracken, every artist has spirits: the creative ancestors to whom they turn. His long list includes not only textile artists and historical craftsmen, but also writers such as poet Essex Hemphill and science fiction legend Octavia Butler, whose novel Mind of My Mind, which explores societal power dynamics, was particularly influential had these weavings.
Wasteful, 2023
Poses suggestive of ritual actions are found throughout Bracken’s work, as are references to all types of belief systems. Although he grew up in a Baptist church, he remembers that popular superstitions about good and bad luck were just another part of life. As an adult, he began to think about how “rituals go beyond the religious.” It helps us get along with each other and ourselves.”
On Season length: Blood Ghost, 2023 (main image)
While Bracken jokingly calls himself an idiot, he utilizes contemporary technology and begins his work with a collage of photographic self-portraits, hand drawings, and clipart assembled using Photoshop. However, improvisation plays a major role when working with these images on the loom. “It’s kind of a burden on me to stick to the plan,” he says. “I need to provide some surprise.”
Diedrick Brackens: Woven Stories is at the Holburne Museum, Bath, January 24th until May 26th.
