Where The Line Falls Slack
Solo Exhibition
Joe L. Evins Gallery, Appalachian Center for Craft
Tennessee Tech University
September 1 - November 15, 2025
Where the Line Falls Slack critically examines the relationship between individualism and interdependence, particularly within the ideological and material landscapes of the American South and southern Appalachia. Rooted in a cultural mythos that valorizes self-reliance, the work confronts the enduring legacy of “bootstrapping” as both a social imperative and an illusion. These narratives are grounded through material engagements with labor, industrialization, and the region’s textile traditions.
A central aspect of the exhibition is its invocation of the cultural and material history of southern Appalachia, particularly through the lens of handweaving revivals tied to early 20th-century settlement movements. Reinterpreting historical overshot patterns, the weavings in this exhibition evoke a region often stereotyped along a binary of idleness and industriousness. Through the repetitive act of weaving, a practice that is at once solitary and communally inherited, the work probes the paradox of self-sufficiency as it intersects with collective survival, shared knowledge, and generational labor.
The impact of Hurricane Helene on Appalachian communities forms another layer of inquiry within the exhibition. The storm’s aftermath exposed not only physical vulnerability, but also the interdependencies that undergird resilience in rural, often overlooked places. In the wake of disaster, community becomes both a lifeline and a framework for reimagining agency: resilience not as rugged individualism, but instead as mutual aid, resource-sharing, and relational survival.
At the heart of this body of work is a personal reckoning with labor and its moral weight, shaped by a southern upbringing where productivity is bound to virtue, and rest is cast as a form of moral failure. This value system, steeped in Protestant work ethics and reinforced by capitalist structures, renders labor as both an offering and a burden. The woven works in this exhibition interrogate these beliefs, manifesting the contradiction between a system that exalts work and one that increasingly undermines the conditions for sustainable living.
The title, Where the Line Falls Slack, serves as both a formal observation and a conceptual fulcrum. It evokes the material behavior of fabric and its gravity - its tendency to sag, fold, stretch, or collapse - as well as the bodily, emotional, and structural weight those qualities metaphorically carry. It suggests slackness as an opening: a moment of pause, of giving way, of potential reformation. In these spaces of tension and release, the physical properties of the textile become a language for precarity and persistence, for resistance and rest. By weaving together the narratives of disaster, kinship, and cultural inheritance, Where the Line Falls Slack challenges the binaries between individual and collective, labor and leisure, memory and place.
Photos by Saturn + Sun Collective.