Annalee Davis is a Mississippi-based weaver who explores the intersections of craft, technology, and historical patterns.

My current work focuses on the intersections of craft, technology, and the woven image. Working on both manual and digital looms, I use the symbolic nature of weaving patterns and archival imagery as dialects to convey personal history. Digital looms, such as the TC2 and AVL Compu Dobby, allow me to reimagine the application of historical weave structures and photographic imagery through computer software. My woven works aim to both recreate tradition and dismantle it through visual distortion, using technology to combine patterns in ways that would have once been incompatible on a manual floor loom. The photographs illustrated by my weavings are rendered into black and white bitmaps, a structural binary code that the TC2 loom reads like a Jacquard punch card. My imagery seeks to encapsulate the nostalgic essence of vintage photographs, utilizing archives from my family lineage and childhood. 

The slow act of handweaving allows me to connect with the past and recall memories in a space that is made safe and stable through structure and physical repetition. The combination of slow hand processes and technological methodologies in my practice speaks to my deep-rooted interest in craft history and my background in digital photography, using traditional crafts such as natural dyes and hand spinning to translate imagery through a contemporary lens. By combining fast and slow processes within my work, I challenge the viewer to consider weaving and its role as a time-based medium, both as a narrative of one’s past and as a larger aspect of culture. The layered and disjointed nature of my archival imagery aims to convey the aura of a scrapbook, an accumulation of memories re-experienced through the tactility of the woven image. Handweaving allows me to reconstruct a physical memory I can take ownership of, empowering me to take authority over childhood experiences in which I felt I had no power.

My woven works not only give structure to the ephemeral nature of memory but hold the space for the essence of those in which I use imagery of. I weave to connect with a lineage of women who worked with fibers, both as a means of decoration and survival. These women are immortalized not only by photographs and the objects they leave behind but are also kept alive through stories. Recalling these narratives, passing stories from one generation to another, is second nature to me — a quality given to me by my grandfather. By using symbolism, text, and altered imagery, I am both telling the story of the image and inviting the viewer to participate in this memory recall and draw connections to their own personal experiences.