Community Snake Banner

Project Description

For their project, Feral Fabric facilitated the creation of a community banner that takes the form of a long, vibrantly colored snake, which is installed on the bridge outside BAC. The body of the snake is made up of panels sewn by dozens of participants working at home from kits supplied by the artists as part of a socially distanced art-making project. During this difficult time, Feral Fabric is drawn to the snake as a symbol of creativity, healing, regeneration, and rebirth. Each panel depicts something the contributor wants to change or shed in 2021.

The artists offered an optional Zoom workshop to participants, where they discussed ideas, techniques, and a brief history of radical textiles as a form of activism. An edited recording of the workshop plays on a loop behind the glass window of the lobby, creating an awkward experience for viewers as they are invited to watch the interaction across shared screens but cannot hear the dialogue. The video actually does not include sound, in a nod to the distance we are all experiencing as we move in and out of stay-at-home orders. The aesthetics of the video combine a surreal mixture of public access television, green screen special effects, hands-on craft workshop, and academic slide lecture.

ARTIST BIOs

FERAL FABRIC is the collaborative project of Bay Area artists Paulina Berczynski and Amanda Walters. It is a platform for highlighting radical textile production in art, activism, and countercultural movements. They bring forward ideas, conversations, workshops, and classes that combine our interests in textiles, contemporary art, and personal and cultural transformation. They have led pop-up banner workshops at marches and parades, and backpatch workshops at BAMPFA and NIAD Art Center.

PAULINA BERCZYNSKI is a Berkeley-based artist working in textiles, print-making, and relational art forms. She came into her current practice after years honing her visual communication skills as an art director, and a decade as design and strategy lead for a sustainable lifestyle brand. In the studio and in on-site projects, Paulina is deeply invested in cultivating empowerment and collectivity through experimentation and participation, and seeks to provide a critical perspective on socially normative and capitalist structures.

AMANDA WALTERS is an interdisciplinary artist, who writes, sews, makes sculptures, and publishes a journal about radical textiles. Her work explores the strange and well-manicured history of human’s relationship with nature, the construction of landscape, images of the tropics, and page 9 stories from the newspaper. Walters received her MFA in Studio Practice and MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. She is based in Oakland.

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Part of the Digital Exhibition “The Option To…”

Berkeley Art Center presents a series of newly commissioned projects by artists working in video, animation, writing, textiles, photography, and interactive media. As we continue to navigate a world of limited interaction, we commissioned six artists to make pieces that we could present online in some way. There was no thematic requirement, no overarching curatorial framework — just an opportunity to respond to our new shared reality with an idea that they saw as relevant to the continuation or expansion of their practice. For us, the value of these works is in the process of their making as much as in the thing that is made.

Their timing coincides with a yearlong initiative by the Feminist Art Coalition to draw attention to projects informed by various feminisms. New projects will be released every few weeks from October 2020 through February 2021.