EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Annette Cords
Annette’s work spans diverse media, from painting and weaving to installation and sculpture. She probes the possibilities of mark-making, examine writing systems and vernacular styles, and ask how we process and interpret visual information. For the past sixteen years, Annette has focused on Jacquard and hand weaving, particularly their material and cultural aspects. For Annette, weaving is a multi-faceted and nuanced form of expression that overlaps and augments developments in writing, painting, and abstraction.
In her tapestries and weavings, Annette explores the interrelationship of visual-textual languages and the play between formal variation and the construction of meaning. “How do we read visual information and establish meaning?” and specifically, “how do we decode our material culture?” are questions central to her work. Many of my forms and visual elements emerge from everyday surroundings. Annette is interested in signage, typography, written words, and the visible mark of the hand, and how these elements co-occur, amplify, and overwrite each other. The tapestries begin with drawings, photographs, and word pairings; elements are added, subtracted, and combined. She then takes one weaving file, doubles back, and repeats part of it. The effect is filmic and glitchy, revealing a search for articulation and form through the playful making of the tapestry itself.
In addition, Annette creates weavings on her floor loom, where she reworks traditional American patterns. She likes to encourage multiple perspectives and interpretations: the tapestries confer a tangible presence to intertwined words and images and hang from frames so that the front and the back can be viewed. Through the interaction of digital and analog ways of working, Annette links disparate elements—digital typefaces and drawn forms, visual weave structures and recognizable texts, pixel-based pictures and tactile surfaces. The unexpected juxtapositions and layering invite viewers to look closely and decipher new meanings.
