GAMBIER, OH.- From its Latin root, translatio, meaning “to carry across,” translation invites us to consider not sameness, but movement. To translate is to navigate across languages, but also across gesture, material, and interpretation. It is a shared effort in making meaning.
The same is true of the woven forms presented in Everyday Anew. Informed by deeply collective actions, each piece carries across more than material—it carries memory, knowledge, resistance, and the layered meanings of place, time, and relation.
At its heart is the work of the Sil鋞 collective, a network of more than 100 Wich women weavers from the Gran Chaco region of Argentina. Their practice, grounded in ancestral knowledge and the use of chaguar, a native plant fiber, is in constant transformation—of material, form, and process. From personal bags known as yicas to monumental woven pieces, their work embodies the time-intensive qualities of their making and the persistence of tradition carried into the now.
One of the artists of the collective, Claudia Alarc髇, who also has her individual weaving practice, supports a shared process rooted in mutual trust. Together, they model a different understanding of authorship, one grounded in care for nature, relationality, continuity, and collective agency. In this way, weaving, like translation, is not just a means of communication. It is a commitment to holding complexity; a way of moving with and through the world in concert with others. There is no fixed message. Instead, there is a collective rhythm of transmission—of voices carried, languages bent, and knowledge rearticulated through the act of making. Everyday Anew invites us to see this not as metaphor, but as method. Through the Sil鋞 collective’s work, we witness tradition not as something static or preserved, but as something alive—responsive to its time, porous to new materials, and continually renewed in the hands of many. The Sil鋞 collective and Claudia Alarc髇 show us what becomes possible when we commit—daily, deliberately—to the generative space between.
Adjacent to this exhibition is a small but powerful presentation of the artist Lenore Tawney (1907-2007). Although Tawney and Alarc髇 & Sil鋞 never met, displaying their practices side by side demonstrates the extensive latitude of expression and formalist flexibility of fiber art mediums, as well as the capaciousness of the woven object in its ability to carry ideas, stories, and the relational bonds of the artists who make them.
