We/Me

Abstract

University of Washington Abstract We/Me Kaitlin Young Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Assistant Professor, Amaranth Borsuk School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences We/Me uses hand-stitched poems to explore how layers of fabric relate to layers of time and space. It is a collection of poetry that is stitched, rather than written, and is slowly made by hand. The poems are endowed with tactility and weight, and occupy a swath of three-dimensional space. The artist’s house in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle inspired the poems that make up We/Me. The layering of text and textiles create a visual metaphor that addresses issues of gentrification, feminism, and land-ownership. These short, concrete poems use wordplay to create friction and elicit multiple meanings.