#relrobinson

When Rel Robinson told us that the internet could be considered one giant fiber art structure, our minds were blown, but she has a point. It’s just one of many surprising observations Robinson throws into a conversation, which, when we talked to her earlier this month, ranged from quilts as archive to the importance of gay sex guides in defying LLM training.

Robinson is an artist, quiltmaker, publisher, writer—but as we learned, these are not stable categories, and one interesting aspect of her work is how one label folds into another. Is a quilt that features language in its design a text? Is hanging one on your wall a form of publishing? We’re not sure there are definitive answers to be had. The delight of Robinson’s work is getting us to ask.

Studio AHEAD: Before we get to the quilts, I’m curious about some of the other objects in your studio: “Historic Girlhoods”, “Male Video Guide,” Robert Falco, a can of Pringles. Are these inspirations or decorations?

Rel Robinson: I’ve always been drawn to Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of the “ragpicker” who, like the poet or the artist, scavenges overlooked materials of contemporary life to assemble a more truthful or transcendent telling of history.

SA: Yes, from his Arcades Project! All about reading the ephemerality of commodities as history. One of my favorite books. Every designer should skim through it.

RR: The studio is a place where I get to collect various forms of detritus and breathe new life into them as objects or images.

I’m very lucky, I have a husband who works in rare and antiquated books/ephemera and knows me very well. “Historic Girlhoods” is a book he brought home when I was researching American Girl Dolls for a body of work titled “Felicity’s Bed Chamber.” It’s the kind of book I would have read as a kid, and I like keeping up that version of myself in the studio.

“Male Video Guide” is a list (with concise yet exacting descriptions) of various pornographic movies from the 80s. I was stunned by the breadth and aesthetic of this taxonomical categorization. Texts like this are the material predecessors to algorithmic feeds and FYPs, technologically obsolete ways of helping you find what you like. I’ve used scans of early 20th-century interior decor catalogues for the same reason. I appreciate that these objects exist in print. While I love and rely heavily on digital relics like the Internet Archive, it’s unlikely that the “Male Video Guide” has been used to train any LLMs. Relegated ephemera like this feel almost out of step with time, like a fossil. 

Together, the books make a diptych that mirrors an aesthetic I’ve been working towards, one that’s both the horny and pastoral. 

Robert Falco is a painter and friend from art school. We were studio mates during the pandemic, which was a really formative time in my practice. His work engages with image culture as a sort of specter, like the moire of a screen. Last summer I published a small monograph of his screenshots through my imprint, Conventional Projects. The screenshot is such a fascinating impulse. It’s a way of grappling with the ephemerality and intangibility of our lives online, a new form of ragpicking! The book is simultaneously a collection of his painting studies and an exercise in the editorial tendencies of my own practice. It’s the first of many to come.

SA: Is Conventional Projects an extension of your solo work?

RR: In my early 20s I lived in an artist collective housed in a former convent, which is how Conventional Projects got its name. I had a studio and a project space in the basement. When I had to stop curating shows during the pandemic I switched Conventional Projects to an artist editions model. My studio work is very solitary but publication allows me to work collaboratively with artists I admire. I always wanted to be in a band, but I have no musical talent or knowledge. Publishing feels a bit like being in a band. 

I used to view Conventional Projects as a distinct entity, separate from my studio practice, but I see them as two parts of a whole in conversation with one another. The books I put out last year, “iPhone Notes Vol 1.” and “Robert Falco Screen Shots” grew out of the same impulse to collect images and ephemera that I use in my studio work. Contextualizing that work into the space of a book only extends my research interests further and it keeps them in circulation. Last year I spoke about iPhone notes with KQED Forum and The Washington Post. I got to reach audiences that I wouldn’t necessarily encounter in a contemporary gallery. 

Conventional Projects is also a very practical endeavor. Simply put, more people can afford a book, a sticker, or a quilted tote bag than a piece of art from a gallery. I love working with galleries, but I appreciate the opportunity to make and publish things that get to live out in the world as well. I’m currently working on two books and an edition of functional quilts, so stay tuned.  

SA: Can you share with us your latest iPhone note? 

RR: “Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venus in Rags” followed by my Kaiser medical record number.

SA: Intriguing. Tell us about your quilts.

RR: I learned how to sew when I was four. The sewing machine had a sort of omnipresence in our home. I grew up in single parent homes, without television or much supervision, so I found ways to entertain myself. I watched my mother sew all the drapes and lay the marble floors herself in the house I grew up in. This made the domestic space feel very androgynous. The curtain served a dual function, protecting us from the outside world and aestheticizing the interior. The sewing machine made things beautiful and safe. It has always felt like a machine with limitless capacities. 

In undergrad I studied photography at SFAI. I was really preoccupied with the question of *why* we felt the need to make photographs, yet the practice of image making always fell short of the spiritual capacity of the medium. Photography and all subsequent forms of digital communication are a means of time travel, but printing photographs in a lab felt flaccid and dull. I ended up in a fiber sculpture class on accident, due to an enrollment error. I was pompous because I already knew how to sew and the assignments felt juvenile. We were supposed to make a bag, so I peeled a bunch of fruit and then sewed the skins back together. That's when I started to think about what was possible with thread and fabric, and how the act of binding disparate materials together and quilting was another form of record keeping, like a photograph. In concert with one another, the image feels true, and makes space for the body. Like the ragpicker, so much of my practice relies on the evocation of touch.

I consider my practice in the words of poet Ariana Reines: “The images gave us no rest yet failed over/And over despite the immensity/ Of their realism to describe the world as we really/Knew it, and worse it knew us.” 

While I use free motion quilting as a tool, my work might be more akin to relief sculpture than quilts. It engages more heavily with the history of “decorative arts” than that of domestic objects, but both are present. 

I’m interested in the function of decor, the way we use it to both emphasize and obfuscate systems of power within and outside of our emotional lives. I find that sometimes we are suspicious of beauty, as if it is trying to trick us by the nature of demanding our attention. I think there’s an immense capacity for criticality in the notion of wanting to be looked at. 

SA: I like these dichotomies in your work, particularly that of text/textile.

RR: In the studio I try to be a conduit. It’s taken me years of practice to allow myself this grace. I’ve repeatedly taught myself that the clearer the vision at the beginning of the process, the more disappointing the outcome. So, I let myself be motivated by anecdotal or research-based inquiries, and guided by intuition and curiosity.

Quilting has always served as an inadvertent archival methodology. Historically, it metabolized outworn and disused clothes and linens into newly functional objects. But it’s thread that binds the dregs of the past into a new form, a retelling of the past, for the future. 

Thread is what allows fabric to take up space, otherwise it would have no shape. It’s so delicate, I can break it with my fingers, but it’s a fiercely demonstrative technology.

There are many, often cited relationships between fibers and the history of technology. The word “text” itself comes from the Latin word “texere,” to weave. The earliest forms of binary code were modeled after the punch cards used for Jacquard weaving. In felting, quilting, and blocking tapestry you’re essentially rasterizing the material because it literally shrinks by compression, but it’s a lossless compression. It retains its structural integrity, unlike the lossy compression of datasets in the latent space of artificial intelligence. 

In thinking about quilting as a method of speculative historiography, it’s telling that in English we often rely on allusions to fibers to describe narrative. Parts of a story are often woven, stitched, or pieced. We even use the word “thread” to describe the continuity of something. The word “felt” is also a homonym, describing the past or history of one’s feelings but also the variety of wool that is created by repeatedly puncturing the surface and agitating it. The word feeling stems from the Old English word “felan,” to touch or perceive through the senses, while the word “felt,” in regards to the material, comes from the West Germanic “felatz,” something that is beaten or compressed. I’m so struck by this etymological collision suggesting that to have feeling, to have felt is/was to have had something beaten, or compressed, by touch, out of us.

My smartest friend tells me that the best etymologies are typically false friends, but I’m an artist not a scholar so I have permission to yield for poetics.

This is all to say that working with fibers lends itself to dichotomies by nature. Even the medium of “fiber art” is difficult to define: why aren’t paintings on canvas and drawings on paper considered fiber art? Living in San Francisco, when I tell people I work in fibers, 80% of them assume I mean fiber optic networks. If, by definition, fiber art is art that engages with or relies on a fibrous substrate or material of synthetic or organic composition, then the internet is just one big fiber sculpture. So, who’s to say, really.

[This conversation has been edited for length.]

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva