Co-Creating Social Fabric of Belonging Through Bobbin Lace Choreography

Lace is an unstable textile featuring web-like thread structures and aesthetic open spaces. In bobbin lace, many threads wound on small wooden sticks (bobbins) are moved sequentially to create intricate patterns across a surface full of holes. Before lace, holes existed in the context of the structures of preexisting cloth. In the early 16th century, lace was developed in Europe as a laborious, additive process of “punto in aria”, Italian for “stitching in air”. In lace, both the holes and the lace design are made by strategic placement and tensioned movement of threads.

This level of profoundly freeform cloth making was the result of gradual technical innovation developed by generations of lacemakers who rarely could afford to embellish themselves with the lace they made. Marginalized by the established social fabric and excluded from uneven distribution of wealth, the artisans’ deep relationship with and appreciation of materiality motivated them to look for new ways to build and define holes and a new form of governing system of threads that were meaningful to them.

The structure of lace provides a new way to imagine the concept of social fabric, a metaphor for the relationship and connections individuals make with one another as common threads of a society. In Ground Ensemble, students will take time to understand and trace their own thread, then perform as autonomous lace bobbins that interlace to form their own foundational social fabric while defining open spaces that are important to them. Unlike woven cloth which has a rigid structure featuring a binary system and repetitive motion of over and under, the logic of

lace is incredibly flexible, allowing different forms of intersections and entanglement to take place simultaneously. No one exists outside this fabric, as each bobbin and pin plays a role in tension-keeping in order to govern the integrity of the cloth. Ground Ensemble will help increase UW’s capacity to create homes for diverse identities, experiences and perspectives. It is one of UW’s diversity blueprint goals to “serve students from communities that are underrepresented in higher education, including students who identify as Indigenous, Black, and People of Color; students from low- and modest-income families; students who identify as disabled, LGBTQ+, veterans, and alumni of foster care; international students; transfer students; and students who are part of recent immigrant populations.” Throughout the quarter, students may find Ground Ensemble a productive space where they
can meditate on ways they exchange pasts and presents to make space for collective belonging, now and beyond. Bound in the same social fabric, they will also learn to negotiate visibility, invisibility and shifting between states.