Working in the generative space between abstraction and figuration, the uncanny and the earthbound, Socolofsky's tapestries appear to link symbolic diagram with surreal iconography.
Digital Work
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 Work
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.
My Story
As a young art student in France learning the Gobelins technique, Socolofsky was inspired by medieval tapestries but never saw herself in those royal stories. Coming from city streets where graffiti bleeds across walls and wires coil above sidewalks, she collected contemporary fragments—municipal archives, street corners, social media glitches—to weave her own urban mythology. She works like a street sweeper before sunrise, mending the fabric of overlooked places thread by thread.
Weaving becomes meaning and metaphor for contemplating memory, erosion, impermanence, continuity, and our place within deep time.
The Process
Part ode, part semaphore, Soco’s work combines the skill, sensitivity of painting with the structured complexity of ancient frame loom and industrial Jacquard weaving to produce woven tapestries that hover just on the edge of recognition. Her process begins with sourcing consumable images: moving drone stills, google earth snapshots, photographs of everyday objects, transforming them using mathematical strategies; adapting them into instructions the TC2 loom can interpret. Reinvention, transformation, layers, loom technologies, thread, and the physical act of weaving become meaning and metaphor for contemplating memory, erosion, impermanence, continuity, and our place within deep time.