The touch of fabrics and recycled materials hold a specific kind of energy and narrative in ‘Torn and Woven’ exhibition

Both of Oslyn Whizar Toscano’s grandmothers used to sew when she was growing up, and her godparents were in the textiles business. Her mother would visit the godparents’ shop and was treated to a bunch of free dresses, while little Oslyn made her way through the rows, rubbing those pretty dresses against her face.

That sense of touch, and the learning that comes with it, has followed Toscano into her work as a multidisciplinary artist and her series of abstract works — that she refers to as textile paintings — in her latest exhibition, “Torn and Woven,” at the Visions Museum of Textile Art in Liberty Station through Oct. 25.

In “Torn and Woven,” she uses frame loom weaving to create pieces that use natural and synthetic fibers, and repurposed materials, to share fabric as a structure with depth, life, memory, and energy.

“Visions has done a very important work in inviting Tijuana textile artists to the museum. … People will see a piece of cloth, torn, with yarn that is woven,” she says of the five pieces that will be on display. “I hope the spectator also can see that what I’m trying to do is just to illustrate how much of my work has to do with energy, so I think these pieces are just showing the way that energy can be caught in textiles.”

Toscano, who lives and works in her hometown of Tijuana, took some time to talk about getting her start in painting and her introduction to fashion, her connection with weaving as an ancestral technology, and her views on animism in relation to the recycled materials she includes in her work. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )

Q: I read that your introduction to creating art was through your work in fashion?

A: Fashion was the first contact that I had to the creative world when I was growing up. My cousins had a lot of Vogue magazines, so that was the first thing I really saw that excited me. Then, I started working in a secondhand business, in a swap meet over here, and I learned how to use this sense of touch with the materials-the cotton, the linen, the silk. I realized I had had this training just by touching. The person I worked for was very mindful of reconstructing the clothes; if a button was missing, or a zipper, or something was wrong with the hem, she really reconstructed it so that the quality would be very good secondhand quality. Later, I started putting clothes in my work and I started experimenting with actual fashion.

Q: Can you walk us through this path from fashion to painting to textile art, jewelry, and ceramics?

A: It was first painting, and I think the path was a way of looking for income because art is a little bit hard to sell. I had a real confidence in my crafting skills, in my work with my hands, and thought maybe I could start making jewelry and have an income. I had an income for a while, and then I put up my own vintage store in my studio, which was big, so I could fit it in very well. It all fit together very well and I kind of left the artmaking aside. I focused on the business and it was really good, but I got tired really fast because I had this artmaking inside me. So, I started looking, again, at my career and things started happening. I just couldn’t manage both because the textile work takes so much time. I learned how to weave and I’ve been weaving since the pandemic. When it was over, things started getting a little bit better in my career, so I focused just on that.

Q: You grew up in Tijuana and I read that experimentation and a “borderland perspective” have been part of shaping your artistic point of view; can you talk about your experience and perspective of this border space? How has that informed the way that you approach and create your art?

A: Yeah, I spent about 12 years without a visa. Growing up in Tijuana, you can have a visa since you were born, like it’s nothing, so all of my life I have had a visa, except for these last 12 years. What was really interesting for me was the way that the objects and secondhand importation get through the border because I could actually find everything that I could buy over there, over here, just by going to swap meets or secondhand stores. At first, I found that I didn’t have to actually cross to get my supplies. It was interesting to notice and to be conscious of that. Recently, I’ve just gotten my visa and everything is like new for me, crossing the border. I can understand that physically crossing the border feels exhilarating and it feels a little bit violent, I guess. I have spent so much time over here and I am excited to renew that conversation in my work. I feel that I was a little bit stagnant in this posture that I didn’t need to cross for the work to be borderly, just because I lived in a border site, so I think I am just going to explore a new side of the border, in that sense. A lot of artists here talk about the border directly and it has shaped a lot of conceptual aspects in Tijuana artists; I would rather not focus on that very obvious (part) and let the experience of crossing the border reshape something in my art, I guess.

Q: Do you have any ideas about what you think that will look like in your work now?

A: My work is very intimate for me, it’s very personal. The way I go about it is by personal experience and hoping that it will reflect an emotion or a state of mind in the person who sees it. When you ask this question, I think it could look like my work could be a bit happier or more open? I’ve been working so much from my emotional side that it could be a little bit detached, somehow. I don’t know how it’s going to look physically, but I know that I want to weave. I know that there will be weaving and, in that sense, I think that the work that I’m showing in Visions Museum has a lot to do with that because the action of tearing the fabric to weave it in, I feel that has to do with how weaving is a zoom in to the fabric, and the fabric is a zoom out. So, I think it will have to do with maybe a revisiting the origins of the borders, if that makes sense. The origins of the border, of the fabric, of myself.

Q: How did the idea for “Torn and Woven” come together for you?

A: I had a recent residency in Mexico City where there is this new thing about tearing the fabric, and weaving, that came up. I guess it’s from the creative process that the ideas start blooming. I had been weaving my first large-scale piece for a show before the residency, on very large-frame looms. As I was wefting the loom, I don’t know, I was just thinking about how I could put together two aspects of my work — the work that I was doing with fabric, that was painting, and the work that I’m doing with weaving. It became clear to me that they didn’t have anything to do with each other because as I started weaving, I zoomed into the fabric and was no longer very interested in this painting aspect. I think this “Torn and Woven” show is doing away with painting, maybe, but at the same time, the textile paintings were a way in for me to weave. There is a lot to explore, conceptually, but what weaving gave me was a very new sense of touch. I went crazy realizing everything that I could make with yarn. I guess textile painting was a form to enter weaving, and weaving was a form to enter the sense of touch and of structure. Weaving is a very meditative thing to do, and I just started thinking about how textiles can be areas of memory and of energy. I started thinking about energy in a machine and the different types of energy that could imbue in the piece. At the same time, I guess I started to put them together with this exhibition because I still have the fabric, I still have the weaving, and I realize that they are different, but this was my way of putting them together.

Q: How did weaving become a way for you to “reconnect with ancestral knowledge”?

A: I’ve always been interested, in my body of work, of our first necessity for beauty. I guess I would go back to the cave age and think about the first objects that people used to adorn their space, or the cave paintings. That is really important that I always have that in mind, a particular search for beauty, or the meaning of it. When I started weaving, I was so amazed that the frame loom weaving is the easiest because the machines, the looms, can get very specialized. There are a lot of types of looms, but the frame loom is just a frame and you can wrap the yarn around and put a horizontal one in and one out. That blew my mind and it put me back in connection in realizing that it was a very early technology. I still feel very amazed by it. I think I’m going to do a lot of frame weaving before I get into another loom because it just blows my mind. It’s so easy and it’s so intricate at the same time, and that connects me to that aspect.

Q: In your artist’s statement, you say that you feel very conceptually close to animism, the belief that all objects have a soul, and that it compels you to use reused materials in your work. Can you talk about your process for selecting some of the materials we see in “Torn and Woven” and what kind of meaning and narratives those recycled materials gave the pieces they’re part of?

A: Yeah, one of them is a tapestry that I found years before using it. It’s a piece of fabric that’s used to furnish for upholstery. It’s also vintage, so it’s uneven so that I couldn’t frame it and I was just waiting for the right thing to come up for that piece. It’s the first piece that I tore and wove. These pieces came out just by experimenting, and when I was looking at them with the curator, we were talking about how these things look like energy spheres, they look like seeds, they look like things from the sea. Without being conscious of it, they illustrated what I was wanting to say about the animism in my work. Even though it’s very abstract, I think I’ve come into a phase where I can show what I am thinking-this animism, this energy, the materials. There’s a tapestry I am using, also, of raw cotton canvas. I very much like to recycle and reuse natural fabrics, I look for them, I’m sourcing. There is also satin because satin is very important in my process; it was the first fabric that I saw as painterly. And, the yarn is very special because it’s a yarn that was given to me. It used to belong to a very important artist and it was stored for a lot of years, so when they gave it to me, I thought the yarn wouldn’t work because yarn can start to get moths? The person who gave it to me thought that I could use it, so I started to do a little investigation and I had to wash the yarn. I’m still washing it. I had to skein (loosely coil) and unskein the yarn. The physical part of having the yarn in my hands was really meaningful to me, the sense of touch. I could feel a difference in the yarn, in the wool. It had a bit of an oily quality. This is the yarn I’m using in the exhibit, it’s a repurposed yarn, and I think there is not a lot of talk about this because we think that yarns can go really bad really easily; but they still have life. The yarns can be saved. It’s because these yarns are tainted with these chemical colors and these chemical colors save them from the moths. While there is a big movement toward natural dyes, I don’t go there because my interest is in reusing. I’m discovering the chemical qualities, the good qualities of this way of dyeing, I guess.

Q: As I’m hearing you talk about that process where, initially, you weren’t interested in taking that old yarn because of your perception that it would be too old, not really usable, there wasn’t much you thought you could do with it. Then, you go through this process of having it in your hands and having to really care for it-wash it, be gentle with it, bring it a new sort of life. You said you could feel the changes in it, and what comes to my mind is that it almost seems like that process could be a metaphor for you and the meaning and narratives that you’re including in your work. Did any of that come to you during the process or after the process? Like, a larger meaning by going through that process with the yarn?

A: It’s very good for me to hear you say it because I think I am integrating that. I’m still early in this process of these five works that are like the beginning of this series of tearing and weaving, and because I haven’t finished repurposing the yarn, it hasn’t come to me that way yet. But now that we are talking about it, I guess it really makes sense. It does go in that way that the narrative that I want to tell, I would like to touch the intimacy that the spectator can get now, having a one-on-one with the exhibition. Seeing, observing. Yeah, I think you’re right, yes.