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 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
My practice merges ancestral textile technologies with computational image systems to create drawings, woven paintings, and installations that function as material artifacts and techno-mystic interfaces. Working at the intersection of craft, code, and cosmology, I use weaving as a way of thinking, remembering, and speculating across time.
For centuries, textiles have carried information. Early Andean weavings encoded social, political, and cosmological relationships, while historical tapestries documented events, projected power, propaganda, and shaped cultural memory. I am drawn to these lineages of pattern, memory, objects and archive.
Through the layering of photographs, aerial imagery, digital fragments, geometric structures, and historical references, my work traces the transformations that occur as images move between perception, code, and woven form. Like geological strata, these layered compositions accumulate multiple temporalities within a single surface. Influenced by Pre-Columbian textile traditions, Indigenous mapping practices, Sufi cosmologies, and historical cosmograms, I construct woven fields where landscape, memory, mythology, and data coexist simultaneously.
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