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It is tempting to see it as a happy ending. In Diedrick Brackens’s Ttowards the greenest place on earth, two Black men in the artist’s signature silhouette form throw an arm about each other’s waists, while holding opposite ends of a broom. Perhaps they’re about to enact the wedding folk ritual and jump backwards over the besom, or fly away on it like witches. One of four large textile works in the US artist’s first UK show, Woven Stories, at the Holburne Museum in Bath, its companion pieces are somewhat less bucolic: suggestively mythic tableaux with hints of violent ritual.
Talking to the artist via Zoom from his studio in Los Angeles, however, it becomes clear the tender scene is at most a moment of reprieve. “That piece is overtly about love,” he says. “It’s such a fraught time right now. All the things I care about are in trouble: landscape, gender, race, ritual and spirituality that isn’t tied to a colonial past. But I still quest for those things and dream of them.” Conjuring something akin to abstract expressionist painting, the weaving’s backdrop is made from multi-hued threads: greens mixed with steamy blue, torrid orange and yellow. It’s more heat haze than landscape, intangible, out of reach.
Bracken’s poetic, political work exploring, among much else, his experience as a queer Black man, has seen him garner attention as part of the new wave of identity-focused American artists. His love of weaving, meanwhile, has coincided with a recent upswing in appreciation for textile art. He first discovered the medium as an art student in his home state of Texas in 2008, a year after the iPhone launched and before the digital takeover of daily life would make crafting an act of cultural resistance. “It’s a sensory thing,” he says of those first encounters. “There’s the colour and feel of the yarn. The loom has a quiet beauty and rhythm that really suspends you in time.”
With inspirations including west African kente cloth, European tapestry, California fibre art pioneer Ed Rossbach and Norwegian Hannah Ryggen’s anti-fascist tapestries, Bracken has since developed a distinctive oeuvre. His work explores questions thrown up by lived experience and how history, religion and lore continue to resonate. One concern in Woven Stories is the nature of sacrifice and violence, be it physical or mental, religious or secular. “One has to sacrifice something to get something else,” he says. “In my own life, to make something I have to dedicate the time, commit to getting up at a certain hour every day. Through ritual, you manifest a power, supernatural or otherwise.”
Bracken’s themes reverberate between the quotidian and the mythic, and he’s adept at pulling us in different directions emotionally, too. With its sacrificial pig and riff on the Bible parable, his weaving Prodigal hovers between an act of celebration and butchery. Typically for Bracken’s work, this story of the wayward son reclaimed chimes with his own experience, leaving his home state and striking out on a different professional path to his family. “You can be from a place and feel outside it,” the artist says. “I would never want to go deer hunting, for instance.” He looks to this popular Texas pastime in his work where a young buck is strung up and a red human outline is superimposed upon it like a ghost or a memory, suggesting other terrible ways our aggression has manifested.
Bracken says he uses animals as stand-ins for people’s feelings and interactions, citing that moment in a movie you’ve seen repeated 100 times, where a deer killed on the road presages trouble to come. “We all have darker tendencies we have to negotiate within ourselves,” he says. “The utopic image with the figures on the broom is not necessarily how life unfolds.”
Fruits of the loom: three works from the exhibition
Towards the greenest place on earth, 2023
Bracken first developed his signature silhouette form after an art school assignment to create a self-portrait inspired by Hope, Shepard Fairey’s iconic poster of Barack Obama. Bracken began experimenting with removing his recognisable facial details and later found creative kinship with other Black artists using silhouettes, such as the leading American Kara Walker and the Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón. “I use the black surface to think about the psychological and racial simultaneously,” he says.
If you have ghosts, 2024
For Bracken, every artist has ghosts: the creative forebears they turn to. His long list includes not only textile artists and historical crafters, but writers such as the poet Essex Hemphill and science fiction legend Octavia Butler, whose novel exploring societal power dynamics, Mind of My Mind, was a particular influence on these weavings.
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Prodigal, 2023
Poses that suggest ritualistic acts appear throughout Bracken’s weavings, as do references to all kinds of belief systems. Although he was raised in a Baptist community, he recalls how folk superstitions about good and bad luck were just another part of life. As an adult he began to reflect how “ritual goes beyond the religious. It helps us get along with each other and ourselves.”
At the length of a season: blood ghost, 2023 (main image)
While Bracken jokingly calls himself a luddite, he does use contemporary technology, beginning works with a collage of photographic self-portraits, hand-drawings and clip art assembled through Photoshop. Improvisation plays a large part when it comes to working with this imagery on the loom, though. “Committing to the plan kind of wears on me,” he says. “I have to inject some surprise.”
Diedrick Brackens: Woven Stories is at the Holburne Museum, Bath, 24 January to 26 May.
