FIBER ARTIST ALISON ALTAFI
Alison Altafi
The fiber artist behind Loominarium, weaving portals to other worlds inside single-use hoops, one intuitive pass at a time.
Some artists make objects. Alison Altafi makes doorways: woven circles you could swear lead somewhere else.
Today we meet Alison Altafi, a fiber artist living and working in Syracuse, New York. She learned to weave on a traditional floor loom, but for the past few years has been exploring weaving within metal hoops, warping each frame into a single-use loom, a quiet divorce from traditional tapestry weaving that means every creation is beholden to the frame it was born in.
Her work, made under the name Loominarium, is wool gone celestial: cream moons with dark sea-urchin hearts, hillsides of hand-spun texture climbing around a hoop. Viewers keep calling them portals, and she loves imagining them that way. So do we. Just as rare is her honesty about everything around the work: climate anxiety, textile waste, and the parts of an artist's life that should never be posted at all.
Leila
"In recent years, I have transitioned to mainly weaving in the round; I find the cyclical nature of round weaving to be very cathartic and meditative. I create art that feels magical, otherworldly, and fantastical, art that I myself can escape into. I've had my work referred to as portals to other worlds and I love imagining them in that way."
Alison Altafi · LoominariumTell us a bit about your creative process.
I find weaving within a frame to be very cathartic. It allows me to add bold textures and explore the fibers in unexpected ways without worrying about the tension of my warp strings. I weave based on intuition and let the fibers and colors guide my hands. I love to imagine my work as portals to other worlds and hope they provide a beautiful escape for everyone viewing them.
How has the pandemic affected your creativity, and how do you see the world changing?
To be completely honest, my anxiety has increased exponentially since the start of the pandemic. I am extremely distraught over the looming climate crisis and what that means for my small child. I am also painfully aware of the incredible amount of textile waste we produce annually, and I do everything in my power not to contribute to that within my small creative world. All my scraps are saved and spun back into yarn or used to create my upcycled mini horseshoes. I do realize this is a drop in the bucket, but it helps ease my personal anxiety over the climate catastrophe.
What does wellbeing mean to you, and what do you practice?
Being an artist on social media has a lot of downsides, and I often have to take social media breaks for my own mental health. I have so many pieces in my home that I have created and love and will never share on social media. This is to protect my mental health and my creativity. Not everything needs to be for public consumption.
Anything else you would like to share?
I could not be where I am today without the collective talent of the amazing fiber art community. So many talented spinners graciously share their art yarn with me so I can create in this capacity. Many have even taken time out of their day to teach me how to spin up my own yarn. I do not take this for granted, and I love my little fiber art community so much.
"Not everything needs to be for public consumption."Alison Altafi
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