Desire path
2024, Cotton, crop netting, polyester and cotton thread, monofilament, wood, 60 x 120 inches
Desire path is an original poem worked into a hanging textile piece. The text is machine-sewn into strips of cotton and mesh fabric using an imprecise, intuitive freehanded method. Threads dangle from the letters. Some link the words uncut.
About the body of work:
Phototextile assemblages and textual artworks reflect Namnoum’s study of the connections between “text” and “textile” and their shared root texere (weave). Passing through space as a needle passes in and out of a piece of fabric, the trace of her path projects an interior cartography, kin to what Giuliana Bruno terms tender mappings. Her paths and their realization into a monograph and quilts that resemble pages recall Michel de Certeau’s comparison of the city to a text, with walking being its punctuation. These desire paths are marked out on the city and the rural landscape using forestry tape that belonged to her grandfather, and are less an expression of pedestrian delinquency than they are etchings of everyday doubts and wantings that trail and arc and stretch out – a sketching of her thoughts onto the margins of a space. She contemplates the space of longing and how the means of materializing her desires may break apart, eluding her as a dream slips away on waking.