This project responds to the work of the Wing family, who through the 16th and 17th centuries developed modern property surveying as it is known today, championing  the reduction of the natural world into discrete ownership boundaries. Their methods of measuring underpinned the Jefferson Grid of 1784, enabling the westward expansion of settler territory in the ‘new world’.  

By embroidering the surfaces of quilts with the Wings’ diagrams and imagery, I seek to re-situate their abstracted logic of surveying and property relations; moving from the ‘neutrality’ of textual representation to the symbolically charged realm of fabrics. The use of textiles immediately evokes bodily, intimate memories while also being inextricably tethered to the web of production it emerges from. In shifting modes of representation, the value statuses of different knowledge practices become dislodged.

In Projecting original source imagery unto the embroidered surfaces, the work moves between the textual and the textile, rendering the abstract logics of property capitalism into material fabric form. Textiles are always-already entangled with economics and geology; from the cultivation of plants, to fibres which are woven by the global working class. This textual-textile tension requires us to re-focus on the material relations that are affected and formed by the art of surveying.