MARINA PENG

I make textile drawings and tapestries that explore how patterns form across generations.

I had a very imaginative internal world when I was a kid because I had a lot of alone time. I was obsessed with collecting materials and making unexpected things with them. That obsession naturally shifted towards art making.

My practice has had a few eras, including drawing, installation, and sculpture, before I landed where I am now. Although I did a lot of fiber crafts like sewing and knitting as a kid, it wasn’t until 2020 that I began experimenting with weaving and punch needle in my art practice.

Up until my parents’ immigration to the United States, my ancestry was rooted in China. As every child of immigrants knows, you somehow have to balance your home life/culture with a very different one outside the home. All the while, your extended family in your parents’ home country/ies continue on with their lives and the distance continues to grow. Trying to honor all of your cultural values at the same time is impossible. In my work, I’m grappling with these feelings.

They’re almost always red because I’m trying to make experiences that are invisible as conspicuous as possible. Instead of hiding or disappearing into their settings, I want the figures to command your attention. Red also has such strong connotations. In my family’s culture, red symbolizes life, joy, and prosperity. But in other contexts, red signals violence or warns of danger.

For me, the hands often represent an unseen societal force. Especially when they are disembodied or multiplied in the work. They also represent both physical and emotional labor.

Hair is so core to our personal identities, and I use it to help identify myself in the work. But I also think about how hair is manipulated, sectioned off, tied together, cut, pulled, etc., much like our identities.

Absolutely. The Line was my first time adding my own facial features into a work. Making my likeness at this scale felt more vulnerable than in previous works where I used my silhouette only. There are also some nods to my cultural heritage, such as the calligraphy grid sewn with red thread into the background, that make the work feel especially personal.

There’s not necessarily a recurring character throughout the work—I think of all the figures as being different parts of me. Even the hands are my own hands. A lot of the work deals with inner turmoil. I try to explore this by personally occupying all of the different roles within each work.

Because weaving is so rectilinear, I like to challenge myself to break out of this box. Sometimes that means creating an edge that follows the curve of a shape or leaving sections of warp unwoven.

When it comes to scale, you are often limited by your loom’s width, but the length of the work can be incredibly long. With those parameters in mind, I like to create images with life-size or larger-than-life figures, but cropped in ways that allow viewers to focus their attention on important actions and details.