To record the duration of this work would be to sit alongside Betty Pomerleau each day over two months’ time; to watch as her fingers stretch forward and back, a choreographic accumulation of time unravelling into space. The continuum of repeated motions—spining, unwinding, weaving, unweaving—extends from one room into the next, where threads are cut and gathered, and tied into knots.
Found parts of a loom, worked over by many hands, are assembled into a slow-moving machine. What might appear as a chain of production is instead a single breath carried between two bodies—human and mechanized. Four hundred limp, pliable threads are transfixed and bound to its frame through tension. This is the shared time of working together in relation to a structure that both supports and resists motion.
Within this duration, atmospheric variations enter the work—dust folds into its edges, slight scarring and abrasions appear through the slip of a finger, light that seeps in as day cycles into night. The pricking end of a thread meets a flame, swelling as it burns, and altering in colour and compound. Dreaming, too, finds its way in, forming a kind of flesh around the machine. Time stretches as formless thinking reaches into the far corners of the room.
Betty recounts the stories she tells herself while she weaves: women working in harmony with the trees, waists tied to their trunks, heads tilted backwards and eyes fixed to the sky. She tells me about how she and her mother bent the machine’s metal antennas with their hipbones, wrapping it around a column in her studio. About the little gremlins that appear as she works–mischievous presences that tug at her hair and pull her off balance, stirring a soft pulse beneath her skin. These stories, clues to a situated knowledge, gather as small notes at her feet, narrative threads that amass in space, both physical and imaginary.
At the end of the chain, weft is lifted away from warp, gently loosing its threads. Freed, they move from one work into the next, carried forward through successive weavings and performances. It is in this moment of release that I think about the myth of the Three Fates, which Betty’s actions follow in sequence. A lifeline takes form, beginning with a single bobbin of stolen thread that is repeatedly recast over time. She spins, pulling outward; she measures, to the height of her body; she cuts, scoring motion and giving each knot its own name. Only, here, cutting is a soft and necessary violence. It shapes without destroying. The memory of a gesture, held long enough, only to unravel again.
— Text by Ally Rosilio
