Meet Diedrick Brackens, the weaver who's bringing an age-old craft into a contemporary light.
“I’ve been thinking about catfish for a while, relative to Southern identity and heritage—how much they’re in the landscape and food. They are seen as scavengers or bottom-feeders, the lowest form of fish you might eat, but I like the idea of elevating them to the level of tapestry. They’re my spirit animal,” says Brackens, from his small studio in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where two looms take up most of the floor space and piles of weavings take up the rest.
Brackens’s catfish offer a way of updating motifs from Renaissance tapestries, which generally feature more stately animals like horses or unicorns. But that’s far from his only historical reference, as he works to combine different cultural traditions, including the stripes associated with African weavings, especially kente cloth, and the improvised patterning of American crazy quilts.
Brackens uses both commercial and natural dyes for his tapestries—Lipton black tea is a favorite. “It’s connected for me to being black, queer, and Southern. In Southern slang, ‘tea’ is another way to talk about gossip. ‘Come over, what’s the tea?’ ‘Spill the tea.’ ” His choice of cotton, too, is loaded, because of “its relationship to slavery—it being a king crop in the South and in Texas.
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