Day 4828: Jacquard Global Weavings & Underground Escalator?

                 

"Stalwart": digital collage.

  

Want music?

    Click: El DeBarge, After the Dance,

 

2GN2S

Jacquard Community and Global Weavings 

by Malaika Temba

“Etched in Soil” (2025), part of ‘She Weaves White Gold’ at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.

“My practice exists in the tension between rest and labor, between the intimacy of touch and the vast systems that shape our world,” says artist Malaika Temba. “Whether I am working on a small weaving or a large-scale installation, I am always asking what materials remember and who gets remembered through them.”

“Carry Home” (2024), Jacquard woven fabric, acrylic paint, and fabric dye, 49 x 64 inches

Merging digital and analog processes, Temba creates layered textile pieces in an exploration of migration, labor, gender, global trade, and daily life. Using a Jacquard loom, she renders tender portraits of people and quotidian urban scenes, from friends seated together to deliveries being made to the hustle and bustle of daily life in the city.

“(Aunties Patterned Dresses)” (2025), Jacquard woven fabric, 60.5 x 51.5 inches.

Growing up, Temba lived in Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the United States. In moving between countries, the Tanzanian-American artist tells Colossal, “I was always struck by how fabric marks culture, and how pattern, texture, and material can tell you where you are by what people wear, how they use cloth, and what materials are available to them—whether found in nature, brought through trade, or produced by industry.”

 







 

Beauty Salon” (2023), Jacquard woven fabric, silkscreen ink, painting, and sewing machine embroidery,
50 x 70 inches

In art school, Temba learned to use a Jacquard loom, which enables weavers to create intricate patterns using an automated method. Invented in the early 19th century by Joseph Marie Jacquard, the machines originally used a punch card system. By the 1980s, electronic versions reflected advances in computing, and today, these intricate mechanisms can be programmed to create virtually any design.

“I learned to use a Jacquard loom and became fascinated by its duality: the loom as one of the oldest forms of human-coded technology and the Jacquard as a machine capable of extraordinary innovation,” Temba says. The method itself parallels the artist’s interest in material and systems. Recently, she has been interested specifically in sisal, a cultivated plant and fiber deeply entwined with labor and trade in Tanzania. Sisal is often used to make durable products like rugs, rope, bags, and more,

“Blue Diana (I don’t know what lighter feels like)” (2025),
Jacquard woven fabric and paint, 69 x 51 3/4 inches

The artist currently has an installation titled She Weaves White Gold on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art, comprising three pieces set against ornate wallpaper. In this work, Temba employs sisal as both the primary material and the concept, as she portrays individuals and communities “carrying stories of work, migration, and endurance across geographies and through systems of production and exchange.”

   

Detail of “Blue Diana (I don’t know what lighter feels like)”

After creating the main textile element, Temba often hand-manipulates the fabric by unravelling areas, adding paint, and silkscreening. These layered elements add to a sense that the work is always in a state of flux—simultaneously constructed and undone. “Over time, these pieces have grown larger, more collaged, and richer in texture, capturing multiple moments within a single woven scene,” she says.

“Preparing Dinner” (2025), Jacquard woven fabric and paint, 61 x 52 inches

Temba’s work honors the lives and labor of especially people in East Africa. “With tense elections in Tanzania and the ongoing war in Sudan, I am thinking a lot about visibility, dignity, and what it means to represent ordinary people at a time when their stories are often reduced to headlines or statistics,” she says. “Creating these works is a way of slowing down that narrative, of insisting that daily life—the gestures of care, the rhythm of work, and the persistence of women—has value and deserves to be seen.”

“Veggie Market” (2025), Jacquard woven fabric and paint, 57.5 x 51.75 inches

She Weaves White Gold remains on view through autumn 2026 in Raleigh. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

“Bismillah Auto Repair” (2024), Jacquard woven fabric, chalk, and sewing thread,
 60 x 46 inches

(Claustrophobia alert?)

 

  

 

A 5 minute video, Slo-mo Moths, here

 

  

 

Just because ...

Golden Babbler

 

Wednesday's Smiles ... 

 

 

      Hoping you see all the good things in your day.