Kate O’Brien is an artist, educator and academic researcher. Her work aligns mathematical creativity, textile practices and improvisational movement for a interdisciplinary pursuit of the unexpected and the unknowable. She is currently engaged in doctoral research, investigating the mathematical practices of textile artists and the aesthetic practices of mathematicians. This work focuses on how artist-weavers work topologically and, in particular, how technical interventions into the loom generate new material and conceptual forms.
Kate lives in Manchester, England.
Heather MacKenzie is an artist and educator with a practice founded in hand weaving. She finds joy in experimenting with materials, processes, and loom technologies. As a child, Heather would regularly disassemble and reassemble objects in her home, wondering at the rules and logic of their operation: the rotary telephone, the radio, and the toaster oven, among other characters. While logicking through multi-dimensional weavings, she continues to poke at systems and structures and rules, questioning the possibilities of engagement. In her long-term research, she plumbs Platonic mathematics, the US petroleum industry, and standardized measurement.
She is based in Minneapolis, MN, where she is a year-round bicyclist and avid fermenter.