Working in the generative space between abstraction and figuration, Socolofsky's tapestries record time, encode knowledge, and mediate relationships between bodies, land, and machines.
digital wovens
These tapestries transform consumable images—drone stills, satellite images, everyday objects—into digital loom instructions through mathematical strategies. Each shuttle is still hand thrown, requiring the weaver's physical presence and engagement with every complex weave structure across the cloth. Weaving becomes meaning and metaphor for contemplating memory, erosion, impermanence, and our place within deep time.
analog wovens
These works are woven on an ancient frame loom using a Medieval technique known as Gobelin and take an average of one year to complete. The tapestries created are about weaving contemporary urban imagery—graffiti, street photography, archival fragments—into traditional tapestry form. The process demands discipline and slow resistance to digital speed in the modern day of image circulation.
artist statement
Working between drawing, a medieval frame loom, and digital Jacquard technologies, I treat weaving as a way of thinking. The loom is a network—an early computational device animated by the binary rhythm of over and under, presence and absence.
Geometry guides the work: vesica piscis, grids, circles, lattices. These proportional systems are both compositional tools and metaphysical propositions—reminders that mathematics and weaving long preceded written language, offering ways to glimpse the infinite through pattern.
Within these ordered structures I welcome interruption. Glitches, mis-registrations, and algorithmic drift enter the weave as collaborators, unsettling the grid and allowing contingency to surface. The tension between structure and accident produces a living field.
My deeper research traces resonances between scientific discovery and theological thought. Quantum physics, wave–particle duality, and contemporary cosmology echo ideas long explored within mystical traditions—from Sufi conceptions of unity and vibration to broader inquiries into the nature of presence, absence, and the unseen.
Recent works translate drone imagery, hand drawings, and bodily gesture into kaleidoscopic textiles. In these translations, craft, code, and cosmos fold into one another, and cloth becomes a sensitive membrane—registering our entanglement with technological systems, metaphysical inquiry, and the deeper rhythms of time.
Weaving becomes meaning and metaphor for contemplating memory, erosion, impermanence, continuity, and our place within deep time.
the process of digital handweaving
Socolofsky’s work combines the skill and sensitivity of painting with the structured complexity of ancient frame and industrial Jacquard weaving to produce woven tapestries that hover just on the edge of recognition. Her process begins by layering drawings with sourced consumable images: moving drone stills, google earth snapshots, photographs of everyday objects, transforming them using mathematical strategies; then translating these designs into instructions the looms can interpret.
All work is hand woven - combining ancient handwork with computational crafting