Untitled Weaving for Living Room Window, 2025
Handwoven silver thread coated with cottonwood seeds, collected from last spring to this, without a clear intention, and thinking they were pollen
72” x 50’’

This work is shaped by a constellation of events and symbolically charged materials: silver thread and what I’ve come to call “pollen” (in truth, cottonwood seeds). It approaches these influences in an associative, intentionally fragmented manner, tracing tensions and intersections: womanhood and femininity, love, the Lacanian not-all, the pull toward (or away from) cohesion, erotic rage, recurring dreams of urinating and ejaculating in men’s washrooms…

Documentation images are from Vulnerable Pleasures at Gallery Gachet (2025, credit: Blaine Campbell) and a preliminary Open Studio presentation at the Burnaby Art Gallery during my Deer Lake Residency (2025)

During Vulnerable Pleasures, a parallel exhibition to the conference Feminine Desire: Honouring the Life and Work of Anne Dufourmantelle and Mari Ruti, artists were paired with psychoanalysts, who wrote responses to the works without knowing either the artist or the details of the pieces.

Here is the response to Untitled Weaving for Living Room, written by Sharon Green:

What an honor to reflect on this work of art – a weaving of silver threads and cottonwood seeds.

Even through the digital images, the work emanated a powerful energy demanding that I go outside of my comfort zone and attempt to write in poetic form. However primitive my effort may be, it is meant as a humble ode to the feminine and to the multitude of asso- ciations and images evoked by this wonderous tapestry.

Silver threads, aligned, eternal maternal matrix
Receptacle of becoming
Cycles of generation and destruction
Pulsations, ruptures, fluctuations, rhythms

White unordered threads, cottonwood puffs, brown seeds
Chaotic excess carried by breath and wind
Held, nurtured in the Receptacle, Plato’s Chora
Plato, who knew:

“The mother and Receptacle of what has come
To be visible and otherwise sensible
Must not be called earth or air or fire or water but ...
All-receiving...” (Timaeus, 51.)

The maiden Arachne weaves the truth
Warp and woof revealing transgressions of gods
So many deceits for raping women
A tapestry so perfect enraged Athena strikes

Shamed Arachne hangs from her suicide noose
Until Athena denies her even this desire
Transformed, rope becomes fine thread and Arachne
Now Spider Woman forever dangling, weaving

Spider Woman, perhaps mother, daughter, sister, aunt
To three goddesses holding threads of time and destiny
Klotho spins, Lakhesis measures, Atropos cuts – the thread of life
The Fates weave birth and death into our tapestry

Kristeva’s chora, mother’s body death drives
Subject-in-process, subject-on-trial
“This is to say that the semiotic chora is no more than the place
Where the subject is both generated and negated
The place where her unity succumbs before the process...”

Sharon R. Green, PhD, LICSW has had a private practice of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic therapy and clinical consultation in Seattle, WA, USA, for over twenty years. In addition to her clinical practice, Sharon is an independent researcher whose most recent work on shame has been published in Theory & Psychology and The British Journal of Psychotherapy.