Mint

Brooklyn based artist John Paul Morabito has been dedicated to the art of the loom for nearly a decade. His work has been shown at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, the Lancaster Museum of Art, the Cleveland State University Gallery, and the Suffolk Museum. In tandem with his studio practice, John Paul maintains an active role as a commercial textile designer. From 2007 to 2009 he worked as a weaver with the Suzanne Tick Inc. Design Team and is currently a designer for Richloom Fabric Groups. He received a BFA in fiber from the Maryland Institute College if Art in 2005.

Plain Weave with Stripes, John Paul Morabito

Warp Faced Plain Weave, John Paul Morabito

Plain Weave with Stripes, John Paul Morabito

LP: Do you have any guilty pleasures?
JPM: Reality Television, it’s histrionics at their worst. The ridiculous behavior is absolutely infuriating but I still just can’t get enough.

LP: What’s the staple ingredient in your kitchen?
JPM: I grew up in an Italian American family so food and cooking are something of a religious experience. Olive oil, garlic, and onions have a permanent home in my kitchen. I’ve got a gallon jug of olive oil sitting on my counter and in my opinion there is no such thing as too much garlic.

LP: What is your favorite city that you’ve visited?
JPM: Barcelona is a pretty amazing place. The city’s architecture is astoundingly beautiful and you can wander from areas built in the Gothic age into the modern works of Gaudi. I love that both are so strongly present. That and the food is pretty fantastic.

LP: From what I can tell, your work is pretty firmly rooted in the concept of creation and destruction. Why are you drawn to this concept?
JPM: Creation and destruction beget one another, this can be readily seen in the relationships of birth to life to death. I am particularly interested in how awareness of this influences our behavior – there are rituals and celebrations surrounding birth, aging, and finally death. In my work I explore how this awareness is expressed through compulsory behavior by making and then destructing what has been made. There is a need to make something and then a need to destroy it, neither can be ignored. It is important to note that the sacrificing of my hand woven textiles is not a violent act. Instead the destruction is achieved through slow repetitive actions that become meditations on each moment that is burnt away. I see the works as thanatologies, records of the act of obsessive making followed by the act of obsessive destructing.

LP: What draws you to weaving and fiber as your material choices?
JPM: I am very interested in hand labor and how meaning can be derived from extreme labor. Obsessive repetitive processes are inherent to textile making. There is a ritualistic endurance that comes out of working by repetition. The body memorizes movements and actions transforming them into tacit knowledge and allowing the mind its own journey. In my case this enables both an extreme focus on the action and a contemplation on what it means.
Additionally textiles are so heavily prevalent within human experience that they leave a myriad of traditions to draw on. I find the story of Penelope to be particularly important. She sat each day at her loom to weave cloth and each night returned to the loom in secret to unravel the days work. There is a strong correlation between Penelope’s ritual of futility and my own making and destructing woven cloth.

Don’t forget to check out John Paul’s beautiful work on his site!

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Lindsay Preston is an artist and graphic designer from San Diego. In “Lindsay’s Quick Queries”, Lindsay brings you work by contemporary artists, and answers to the questions everyone has been wondering about them, like “pancakes or waffles?”