Encoded Cloth – Martha and Wilson

For our encoded cloth project, we focused on the theme of artificiality, the destruction of the natural world and its substitution with the plastic and unreal. We made a quilt out of muslin and cotton batting, two simple materials made of natural fibers, and covered this canvas with black and white representations of leaves and sticks, plastic paint on natural cloth. We stitched other forms of plastic on top, stuffed them with plastic, wove plastic into ropes and staples it down, twists of plastic-coated wire glued to plastic with industrial-grade adhesive, loops of plastic thread tying plastic flowers flowers. There are oases of nature, but fake nature. All is subsumed in a choking mass of the plastic and the unreal, brightly colored and toxic.