White Dwarf
2016
María Eugenia Dávila (Venezuelan, born 1966) Eduardo Portillo (Venezuelan, born 1966)
Venezuela
White Dwarf uses four types of thread: smooth silk, rough palm fiber, shiny metal thread, and matte alpaca wool. Collaborators María Dávila and Eduardo Portillo deftly combined these raw materials to create a multilayered weaving in which each material symbolizes a different aspect of the artists’ experiences studying textile-making.
A white dwarf star is an extremely dense star that burns white-hot as it collapses on itself. The weaving belongs to a series of works that Dávila and Portillo call an “imagined cosmos,” which also includes meditations on the seasons and times of the day.
Silk, moriche palm fiber, alpaca, metalized synthetic film wrapped thread (gold and silver), and metalized synthetic film strip (silver); plain weave, multi-layer cloth