Cait O'Mara / Construction
The materials I work with are yarn, concrete, steel, found objects, image and text collages, books, long walks, my ancestors, space, time, and dreams. My primary interest as an artist is acting as a conduit between those materials and my body. The things that are important to me are issues of class struggle, site, land, memory, permanency, and the forgotten. Many of these ideas collide with my experiences as a worker, a non-binary person, a reader, and an observer. I have a duty to the ideas, and I express them through installation, cast industrial materials, found-object sculpture, and hand-woven textiles.
My interest in industrial materials like concrete and steel stems from walking to my studio every day and looking at the slabs beneath my feet where the spaces between hold small pieces of trash and weeds sprout. They infect my consciousness and spill out into my studio. Specifically, the construction site of The Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact that has occupied and disrupted the land near the Millrace studios and Urban Farm. Movement around the objects I create is important to me, how one’s body becomes implicated in the sculptures or cloth, or objects become layered over one another in space as you move closer or farther away. I emphasize negative space between the concrete compositions embedded with glass test tubes, 1981 National Geographic magazines clippings, neon nylon thread, wool, etc., and the thin line of steel that connects them. The textiles drape and layer, packed in a matrix of concrete that emphasizes space through density, contrasted with their airy counterparts draped tenuously above.
My textile work hopes to produce an emphasis on time and the relationship between the ancient, present, and future. This produces a tension in my work that is confusing and sometimes frustrating for me to understand as I practice ancient dye and weaving techniques in a contemporary time. I can connect throughout time and space when I follow a pattern hundreds have woven before me or use an indigo vat recipe passed down by mentors. On an individual scale, weaving provides a space where I can enter a state of unity and clarity, for brief moments, in a world of ever-evolving complexity and catastrophe, and return to a meditation on labor, material, and form. But there, at the loom, is just as much complexity and catastrophe. This oscillation between paradoxes is what produces frustration and excitement for me in my studio as I reflect on our world.
Some thinkers and artists that inspire me are Doris Salcedo, Ann Hamilton, Ricki Dwyer, Emma Holmgren, Annie Albers, Mary Kelly, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Helen Mirra, Alberto Aguilar, Micheal Heizer, Rosa Luxemburg, Slavoj Žižek, Elizabeth Kolbert, Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, Stanley Kubrick, The Talking Heads, Kate Bush, Elliott Smith, Amyl and the Sniffers, Johnny Cash, and many more.
TITLE/YEAR: Construction, 2025
MEDIA: Textile, found-object sculpture, cinder blocks, concrete, steel, and aluminum.
DIMENSIONS: Dimensions variable.
TITLE/YEAR: Broken Millrace, 2025
MEDIA: Silk and cotton textile woven on a TC2 digital Jacquard loom, nylon thread, aluminum eyelets, and steel.
DIMENSIONS: Dimensions variable.
TITLE/YEAR: Weight/Weightlessness, 2025
MEDIA: Hand-woven cotton textile, concrete, and cinder blocks.
DIMENSIONS: Dimensions variable.
TITLE/YEAR: Compositions: On Control (Cell #1), 2025. Full view.
MEDIA: 1981 National Geographic magazine clippings, neon flagging tape, nylon thread, zip ties, aluminum vent covers, receipt paper, glass test tubes, wool yarn, $1 bill, copper wiring, Styrofoam residue, concrete, and cinder blocks.
DIMENSIONS: Dimensions variable.
TITLE/YEAR: Compositions: On Control (Cell #1), 2025. Detail view.
MEDIA: 1981 National Geographic magazine clippings, neon flagging tape, nylon thread, zip ties, aluminum vent covers, receipt paper, glass test tubes, wool yarn, $1 bill, copper wiring, Styrofoam residue, concrete, steel, and cinder blocks.
DIMENSIONS: Dimensions variable.
TITLE/YEAR: Compositions: On Control (Cell #2), 2025. Full view.
MEDIA: 1981 National Geographic magazine clippings, neon flagging tape, nylon thread, zip ties, aluminum vent covers, receipt paper, glass test tubes, wool yarn, hand-woven textile, annotated pages from Vivek Chibber’s ABCS of Capitalism: Capitalism and The State, Styrofoam residue, concrete, steel, and cinder blocks.
DIMENSIONS: Dimensions variable.
TITLE/YEAR: Compositions: On Control (Cell #2), 2025. Detail view.
MEDIA: 1981 National Geographic magazine clippings, neon flagging tape, nylon thread, zip ties, aluminum vent covers, receipt paper, glass test tubes, wool yarn, hand-woven cotton textile, annotated pages from Vivek Chibber’s ABCS of Capitalism: Capitalism and The State, Styrofoam residue, concrete, steel, and cinder blocks.
DIMENSIONS: Dimensions variable.
TITLE/YEAR: Compositions: On Control (Cell #3), 2025. Full view.
MEDIA: Drop cloth scrap with weft threads removed, nylon thread, neon flagging tape aluminum grommets, insulated copper wiring, found photograph of a tree, Styrofoam residue, concrete, steel, and cinder blocks.
DIMENSIONS: Dimensions variable.
TITLE/YEAR: Compositions: On Control (Cell #3), 2025. Detail view.
MEDIA: Drop cloth scrap with weft threads removed, nylon thread, neon flagging tape aluminum grommets, insulated copper wiring, found photograph of a tree, Styrofoam residue, concrete, steel, and cinder blocks.
DIMENSIONS: Dimensions variable.
TITLE/YEAR: Concrete Apartment, 2025.
MEDIA: Found stainless steel shelf, hand-woven cotton textile, and concrete.
DIMENSIONS: Dimensions variable.