Anatomy of a White Dwarf: On Life, Home, and Weaving

Only the hot core of the star remains, becoming very hot and then cooling down over the next billion years.

To see a white dwarf, we usually need to look up and out as far as possible into the stars; the closest one to us now is at least 8.6 lightyears away in the nearest binary star system in our galaxy, nested under the brilliant light of the brightest star in our skies, Sirius.

But within our home on this planet, within the Art Institute’s collection, we now have our own White Dwarf, created by Venezuelan artists and weavers María Dávila and Eduardo Portillo. Though they have settled in the mountains of Mérida, Venezuela, where they harvest their own silk, indigo, and wool, and farm their own native plants, they travel the globe to develop their art and expertise. 

I got to know María and Eduardo through the Textile Society of America, meeting in person for the first time at the 2018 biennial symposium. We shared our ideas, especially the links to multilayer weaving and the themes of cosmology. As someone who provides care for textiles in the collection, I was excited to get to know them even better through their art, materials, and technique.

The launching point for our conversation was a seminar I teach at the School of the Art Institute called Micro/Macro Textiles: Artists Research. Through Maria and Eduardo’s overall studio practice, but especially this series, we encounter the ultimate macro to micro experience.

—Isaac Facio, associate conservator of textiles, Conservation and Science

Isaac Facio: What inspired your piece White Dwarf?

María Dávila: A white dwarf is a star that is falling, dying. It is something we were feeling in the collapse of our homeland in 2014. There was a lot of political turmoil in Venezuela. At that point we sought refuge in the mountains and kept traveling further inward. While not geographically far, it was incredibly remote. Throughout our travels within the country, we documented people, nature, every detail. 

In one of those photos, we noticed a mountain that had very peculiar lines across the surface, like stairsteps. We discovered that the ancestral Andean people who had lived in that area faced economic hardships without the resources needed to build on the land. Instead, they created deep grooves on the earth surface to demarcate spaces and divisions of territory. These trenches are about two meters long and are called “cavas de hoyos.”

For us, this was a powerful, awe-inspiring discovery. We never knew that the cava de hoyos existed, nor were they taught to us as an important aspect of the region’s history. Venezuela had never had big things. During the colonial era, Venezuela was never an important place. Everything was small. We had small churches, small plazas, nothing of scale like in Mexico or Perú, or even Colombia. To us, the cava de hoyos were like the biggest thing built in the country, literally.

At the time, we were filled with anguish with everything happening around us. We asked ourselves, what would it be like to reach and cross these mountains? Given the situation around us, it seemed like doing so would be the equivalent of crossing the universe. The only place that one can truly escape from real life is the imagination. No matter where one is, problems will always find you.

Eduardo Portillo: There is no refuge. It was really hard finding that out and that everything we were escaping found us, including fear. We had to find ways to live, cope, and support our young family. One thing we came to learn is that we are all the same. We are all facing hardships in one way or another, but we are all the same.   

María: So we started this body of work on celestial bodies, crossing the universe via our imagination as an escape, seeking refuge from all that was happening to us in real life, in a project that is called “The Imagined Cosmos.” White Dwarf is a part of that project.

Isaac: This multilayer work contains so many different fibers. Could you talk about how you came to work with silk?

Eduardo: When María and I began to weave together, we were working with wool, linen, and the things that we could find at the local stores. We wanted to work with silk but as a raw material, it was nowhere to be found near us. So we said, “Well, why don’t we make this ourselves?”

Marita went to the Canary Islands and brought back 200 silkworm eggs. This transformed us into silk harvesters—sericulturists. We dove heavily into studying sericulture, which took years to learn. 

Harvesting Silk

Eduardo: We studied and traveled in China and then in India, but after some time we wanted to refocus our attention on textiles. 

María: We say that our expertise has been an incidental process because it has developed from searching for the answers to our questions. When we look back at our experience, it is like every thread is a different phase in our life. Things come and enter our studio at different times.

Isaac: That’s so evocative, the idea that every thread represents a phase of your lives. Tell us about the fibers you found at home as well. 

María: After several years we realized that we hadn’t asked ourselves about the native plants and fibers of Venezuela. This is how the moriche palm and other fibers came to be part of our palette. We started traveling around the country and accumulating fibers and experience and getting to know people who had these plants and fibers.

It was a marvelous time, this “trip back home,” teaching us about a country that we didn’t know. We always thought of it as an homogeneous place, so it was a profound experience to travel from region to region, through languages and social behaviors and food, as well as the fibers that are used from place to place. We brought all this back here.

Weavers met in their travels

The majority of our time in the studio is trial and testing. Many times the tests that we believe in most don’t really work, at least until they do. This has taught us to hone in on the different physical properties that each of these materials offer. One supports the other, one gives rise to another, and each one separately can be highlighted for their individual characteristics

For example, the moriche palm fiber is now a foundational part of our work. Whether it’s visible or not, it gives consistency and an integral structure to a weave that we appreciate. It is a thick fiber like the palm itself: rougher, more rustic.

Isaac: How did the idea of using multilayer mosaics on White Dwarf come about?

Eduardo: The mosaic idea started as a single layer cloth. But it turns out that building layers is also like another stage of life, depicting various years of learning and development. We were acquiring these materials and fibers in different steps in our lives and wanted to introduce them in the same weave. The multilayer approach allowed us to introduce more combinations of materials.

mosaics in white dwarf

Details showing the outline mosaic pattern in moriche fiber cord within an alternating three-layer weave structure in wool, silk, metal strip–wrapped cotton, plated copper wire, and moriche fiber

Eduardo: When we were traveling in Europe, we were fascinated by the textile and fashion industry in Como, Italy. We wanted to bring back these fascinating materials that have been engineered for fashion. The people who design these threads are geniuses. We had to collect them. One of the copper threads we used in White Dwarf, for example, is a wire that has a primer (like a varnish) applied in silver or blue. Another is called an “espiralado,” a cotton thread core within a spiral strip of aluminum. 

Two of the threads used in White Dwarf

María: All of this fascinated us, this detailed level of technique and finishing. This itself is another world with a different way of life. We will always have a connection with this experience, with the people that we met and the people that we acquired these threads from. They are part of the multilayer, multilevel experience. We know their names, and they are part of this.

Isaac: So the multilayer fabric integrates and expresses what you were learning. Can you explain how the multilayer weaving process works?

María: Moriche fiber is an integral part of our weaving. It provides stiffness and structure and is the base and skeleton of our work, whether it is visible or not. It is embedded within the layering.  

Eduardo: We use a 24-harness loom with multiple beams that hold different warps. Each type of fiber, the silk and moriche fibers in the warp direction for example, require different handling to maintain an even tension across the fabric that is woven. 

Plain Weave vs Multilayer weave

Eduardo: The combinations of dyed and undyed silk and moriche fiber, both in the warp and weft direction, create a variety of combinations across three layers of fabric in the grid structure that builds the mosaic composition in both directions (warp and weft). The moriche acts as a framing for each square, and in this case, the espiralado threads are only used in the weft direction in several combinations with other fibers or alone.

A micro look at the mosaics weave

Click each image to zoom in even closer

María: This mixture, the integration of fibers and methods, also helps us with our worldview, with seeing cultures differently. It is not that one process of fiber is more sophisticated than another, or that one is better than the other, or the other is lesser because it is more direct, but that they come from different traditions and uses in very different worlds, for very different purposes. Each method and material works exactly for the needs that it was developed for. And it gives us great joy to share our hard-won knowledge with students and the younger generation.

Having experienced loss as our world collapsed around us reminded us that this planet is vast and complex. Each moment, each material, layer, and fiber connects us to our place in the universe, from the outermost macro level of the cosmos to the land and people around us, down to a singular fiber laid within the structure of a textile. Each textile is a world unto itself.

—Artists and weavers María Dávila and Eduardo Portillo with Isaac Facio, associate conservator of textiles, Conservation and Science

Topics

• Collection
• People
• Artists
• Contemporary Art
• Arts of America
• Textiles
• External Voices
• From the Artist