With Every Fiber of My Being: Superpower

Public Art Installation, 2022

With Every Fiber of My Being

With Every Fiber of My Being (WEFMB) represents my joy, commitment, and relationship to being an artist who works with fiber, mixed media, and found objects. My artistic practice includes painting, installation, sculpture, and social engagement using various materials.

Textiles, as a material, offer connection to culturally specific content, whether about nationhood, gender, racialized identities, and economic status. My interest in textiles is predicated on the concept that our individual and shared histories are intricately connected to our humanity and overlapping needs. Fabric, a textile commonly used for clothing, is my material of choice to illuminate those connections.

Fabric is our second skin. Like our largest external organ, the skin, fabrics are the fibrous extension of our bodies and foundational for numerous technological, industrial, and medical advancements. Moreover, we are attached and connected to fabric coverings in ways that allow us to hide, console, celebrate and express ourselves.

With Every Fiber of My Being also speaks to my overall beliefs on the benefits of creating art. I make “with every fiber of my being” because I have to and because it brings me joy. Starting at the bundles of axons within my brain, to every hair, and through the nerves of my muscles. Every network of fibers is precisely distributed throughout my body wants to see, smell, hear, taste, feel, and create.

Textile or fiber-based artworks are created with plant, animal, or synthetic fibers to construct practical or decorative objects. My practice centers around an emotional message or intention, the materials used, and the labor and time spent creating.

My artistic practice primarily ranges from small-scale collages or hand-sewn fabric works to large-scale collages, textile sculptural works, and temporary, site-specific installations to permanent public artwork. The cyclical nature of artistic opportunities coincides with projects, mediums, and my state of mind.

One of the joys and greatly anticipated challenges of being a multi-media artist is reconsidering and revamping an installation. This “reconfiguring” is a language through which I access how my aesthetic language applies or relays the intended message. With Every Fiber of My Being has become one of my visual languages. In the fifth reiteration of WEFMB, this aesthetic language has grown and is linked to my individual development and perspectives about this world.

During these two Pandemic years of induced isolation, reflection and growth, I created two bodies of artwork, Place of Breath and Birth (2020) and Successions: Traversing US Colonialism (2021). I investigated my identity as an Afro-Latina of Puerto Rican ancestry and my nationality as a US citizen of color, a District of Columbia resident for the past 24 years. Each of these bodies of artwork has invited reflection and reckoning with the state of the United States of America and its moniker and role as a “Superpower.” This term, introduced to me during a high-school AP World History class, is defined and used as a noun as “a state with dominant position characterized by its extensive ability to exert influence or project power on a global scale, …through combined means of economic, military, technological and cultural strength as well as diplomatic and soft power influence.”

Yet, let’s keep this simple, consider the definition of Superpower as an ability, such as the power or skills bestowed upon fictional characters in science fiction, fantasy, comic books, television programs, video games, films, and other forms of entertainment or escapism. As an ability, writers, storytellers, and creators from all corners of the world speak of children and citizens (granted mostly men) eventually growing up to become — heroes or leaders—of honor, courage, helpful deposition, and characteristic traits of morality and integrity. By now, we should all be familiar with the adage, “with great power lies great responsibility (Voltaire or Spider-Man).” Albeit a description of fictional characters living in imaginary worlds, they are primarily based on our human experiences to provide examples, metaphors, and mirrors for self-reflection and growth.

This installation's first layer of information is a text layer of the definition of a superpower state and superpower as an ability. The second is a strategically placed floral lace. The structure’s bulk is cells, over a hundred hand-sewn, mixed-media circular forms. These multiple-sized forms are made on wood or plastic cross stitching/needlepoint bases or wire bases. In several of the cell are portions of the United States flag representing this nation’s patriotic influence on me. Yet, I must always find ways to challenge its racist and colonialist underbelly. A painted skeletal layer of wooden butterfly puzzle pieces is embedded between most of the hand-sewn cells. The butterfly body parts symbolize the transformation or transmutation required to overcome the country’s deleterious past.

In between, some cells include dismantled portions of watches. To watch or watches are symbolic of keeping track of time, protecting, guarding, or observing a progression or advancement of something or someone. The eyes, slivers of the US Constitution, Keep Abortion Legal Signage, Keep Democracy Legal and Make Womanhood Legal signage, and other leftover fragments of photographs and other materials remaining from creating the bodies as mentioned above or artwork. Collectively all could be interpreted as the passing of time or cellular growth and possibly progression. Or conversely as policies, legal jargon with racist and oppressive strings or contingencies attached. Again, however, it depends on the identity of the intended recipient.

Essentially human existence is derived from a cell. The molecules in these cells are encoded with data, DNA, and genetic information within all living organisms. This genetic information is passed along from generation to generation. I invite viewers to consider how your ability and right to control your cells and the collective cellular structure we call a body and its intrinsic impact by both internal factors such as DNA, your thoughts, and how you treat your body and external factors such as your environment, social beliefs, and surroundings, cultural and religious practices.

Lastly, this iteration of the installation is about proclaiming that we should all have the right to choose for ourselves …with every fiber of our beings… this should always remain a human right.

How will you use your Superpower, “a state,” or as an ability? As a weapon or an aptitude. (Gift)

Blessings,

Amber Robles-Gordon

Untitled Art Fair

VIP Preview 28 November

29 November - 3 December | Booth C23

Ocean Drive

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Notes to Editor

| About TAFETA Gallery |

TAFETA is a gallery specialising in 20th century and Contemporary African Art. Established in 2013 and located in Bloomsbury, London, with a project space in Lagos, TAFETA remains one of the leading purveyors of some of the most important 20th century artists of African descent. Continually seeking out new talent in the contemporary space, TAFETA has also placed younger emerging artists in important private and institutional collections globally.

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