loomeweight II is a new performance project for one loom and two singers, devised collaboratively by Hestor Dart and Patricia Auchterlonie, unfolding over 45 minutes of weaving and sound. loomeweight is a ritual of remembering the un-rememberable, a gathering of voices and threads, a story told in increments, unravelling and finding itself through its sharing.

 

The performers sit across from each other, the weight of their bodies providing the necessary tension for the warp to be woven into. The structure of the loom is an homage, an imagined/adapted version of a backstrap loom. We weave with scraps of garbage, discarded and forgotten material. As we weave, an analogous tapestry of sound and live singing will unfold, an obscured map built from the fragments of folk songs, sounds of mechanical looms, archival recordings of voices and our own singing - the remnants of a broken aural / tactile tradition, reimagined / reformed / reconstituted into a new language.

 

loomeweight critiques the failures inherent in a system which promotes consumption over the sustainable processes of creating and community building. loomeweight explores the omnipresent theme of ecological collapse, repurposing discarded objects into something of value. loomeweight II remembers lost traditions, dislocated communities and the weavers who suffered and starved; the collateral damage of industrialisation. loomeweight works in opposition to correctness. loomeweight is a celebration of trash. Those who come to witness loomeweight are welcomed - they become a part of the weaving and the calling. loomeweight is vulnerable. loomeweight is impractical. loomeweight is playful. loomeweight is persistent: voice becomes yarn and yarn becomes voice.