LINEAGES
work by Debbie Barrett-Jones and Kristine Barrett
March 2 - May 27, 2023
Leedy-Voulkos Art Center
Lineages explores multi-directional histories through weaving and its site-specific environments, structures, associations, and temporal rhythms. Through a series of installations, weavings, sound, and video, sister artists Debbie Barrett-Jones and Kristine Barrett present kinship and cultural identity as a fluid process rather than a given: connecting, dissolving, and reconstituting through memory, practice, and relationship. This (re)membering relates to the act of weaving and textile practice itself: weaving disparate threads (or bodies, sounds, images, narratives, geographies, and names) into relationship with one another: sewing-severing-suturing. Other ‘genealogies’ emerge through this process that intersects, intervenes, disrupts, and further entangles.
Both Barrett sisters received their BFA’s at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kristine in '01, and Debbie in '07. Currently, each is in their thesis year of graduate school, as Debbie is pursuing a Master of Fine Art in textiles at the University of Kansas and Kristine is currently working on her second Master’s degree in Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley.
Textiles artist, Debbie Barrett-Jones left her small town in Iowa so she could pursue an education at the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) and since graduation, has exhibited her work throughout the United States, including the Kansas City area locations, such as; Children’s Mercy Hospital in North Kansas City, Truman Medical Center, Community Christian Church, Lead Bank in the Crossroads of Kansas City and The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. And in late 2016, she collaborated with the Kansas City Ballet for an art installation and performance called Unspoken. Barrett-Jones is currently working on her Masters of Fine Art at the University of Kansas focusing on textiles and will be graduating this May.
In 2016, she began to envision the "Healing with Weaving" initiative, to highlight the importance of how art, specifically weaving, can be a therapeutic tool for healing. The first Healing with Weaving Community Outreach Program’s pilot project at Children’s Mercy Hospital Adele Hall Campus in Kansas City, MO. The project provides 200 Healing with Weaving Frame Loom Kits with instructions to be used by patients, family members and staff to explore the meditative and therapeutic benefits of weaving during the summer and fall of 2021. Currently, Barrett-Jones was one of nineteen Kansas City artists to be commissioned to make permanent public artwork for the new KCI Airport that will open in the spring of 2023.
As a weaver, I am able to be a part and bare witness of the transformation of a white cone of yarn into a colorful piece of woven art. The tactile person in me becomes alive while in my weaving studio, loving the human connection between me and the creation, as my fingers touch every single thread I work with along the way as I recreate a finished piece. During each process, on the loom and off, is where I find and see connection and lineage between myself, the people in my life and nature.
During the calculated process leading up to weaving and when I am at the loom, I find comfort in its structure and order, dealing with pattern, color choice and working with the straight vertical and horizontal lines of the warp and weft yarn. Disorder follows when I decide to take apart something that was once completely woven, by pulling the warp or weft yarn out. Unraveling/unweaving has been an act of looking back at the past to help discover how something was made. While doing this process I cannot help but think of past memories, not just my own pain, childhood trauma, grief and loss, but others as well.
As I am pulling threads, I find myself acknowledging specific memories and feelings, this act is also an act of letting go. There are parts in my life that are messy, uncontrollable, uncomfortable and painful at times but they coexist with the structured areas of life. And as I allow time to be present during this time of disorder to reorder, I have found the gift of resilience that has been passed down to me from my ancestors. My grandmother-along with her Swedish mother--avidly sewed, crocheted, knitted, and created elaborate needlework throughout their lives; often singing as they worked with their hands to help them survive the difficult years with so much pain, suffering and loss. Recently, I have tried to honor these women in my life by creating work based on my memory of the family farm--which was a refuge and safe place in my grandmother’s mind throughout her adult life. When I take time to reflect not just the farm series but my whole body of work that includes small studies to large pieces, I see how my grandmothers’ resilience has been present within it all.
Thread by thread, beat by beat of the loom, pulling one thread at a time and applying dye or paint to my work, with each process of creating a finished piece, I find acceptance, courage, and gratitude. I hope what I create inspires hope, healing, contemplation and resilience.
KRISTINE BARRETT is an American artist, composer, academic, and vocalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. After completing a double BFA in Studio Art and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute, Barrett went on to study music composition with the legendary Fred Frith at Mills College, where she received an MFA in Electronic Music Composition and Recording Media in 2006. A storyteller at heart, Barrett’s work has been performed, exhibited, and featured in various galleries and media festivals throughout North America and Europe, and was recently featured on the NPR show The Thistle and Shamrock. In addition to her solo work, Kristine has performed professionally with several renowned musicians and ensembles, including the acclaimed Kitka Women’s Vocal Ensemble, Svetlana Spajić, and Trio Kavkasia, among many others. She has directed several community choirs throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Temple of Light Georgian Community Choir, Headlands Community Folk Ensemble, and Sound Orchard’s West Marin Choir. Connecting folklore, textiles, and women’s vocal arts, Kristine is currently working on her second Master’s degree in Folklore at UC Berkeley. An avid hiker, bibliophile, lover of ancient literature and art; Kristine loves being in the non-human world, wooden boats, needlework, and sailing schooners. She currently resides on a houseboat with a myriad of plants, shrines, and animals with her husband in Sausalito, California.
I am an artist, composer, academic, and vocalist specializing in new media and traditional music and ritual song from the Republic of Georgia, Scandinavia, the British Isles, Eastern Europe, and America. Working at the crossroads of ancient traditions, experimental new music, and new technologies, I explore traditional arts, ritual, and folklore as they are preserved, disseminated, and practiced in the age of social media and unprecedented global cultural exchange. Balanced between conservation and experimentation, I act as monk and medium: striving to honor, preserve, and represent the traditional arts mediums and practices themselves, while concurrently allowing the work to be alive in present bodies and technologies, reflecting the shape of the living. Hailing from a long line of folk and classical farmer musicians from the American Midwest, Ireland, and Sweden; I see myself as a link in a continuum of tradition keepers whose lived experiences have shaped, preserved, and imbued the living art forms with the narratives of those living at the periphery of wealth and power: women, laborers, the poor, farmers, the displaced, colonialized, and invaded. Ritual and song become the keepers of invisible histories and hidden lives intimately connected with the spaces and landscapes they inhabit: from Irish keening to Swedish kulning; work songs and deathing rituals of the Caucasus mountains to Serbian song forms for the love of mountains, hills, and rivers. Mastering a variety of vocal techniques and song forms, studying with song masters steeped in ancient traditions, immersing myself in the cultures and geographies of origin, contextualizing my visual and aural art lineage, and deeply internalizing while simultaneously using new technologies to compose and arrange, I create visual and aural composites: from digitally manipulated photographs of California coastline inspired by 18th century Dutch landscape paintings to new music operettas consisting of ritual song from the Republic of Georgia layered with electronically manipulated sonic compositions derived from field recordings, harmoniums, organs, piano, prepared instruments, and voice. Each piece unfolds as a series of maps interlacing various histories, geographies, lexicons, and traditions, exploring hidden intersections and unusual relationships. Although a thorough intellectual understanding is central to my process, I ultimately strive to articulate the more ephemeral and intuitive qualities within a space, landscape, a piece of music, a photograph, a ritual; one that intimately captures the feel and soul of place and song. The result is work that, on the one hand, reveals the essential shape and quality of place and song, and on the other, a vast and wondrous inner connection
