Steel, vintage cotton fabric

2016

Hotel Indigo

El Paso, TX

This installation tells the story of El Paso through the geography of the city. Enmeshed in the city are personal, family and civic histories that can be traced through the interlocking streets like woven textiles or pieced together like a patchwork quilt. The city is a living organism; the streets are the life lines and the neighborhoods are the cells. The Rio Grande, with its shifting shores, contours the landscape like the people shape the city with their customs, anomalies and daily patterns. El Paso, bounded by the Franklin Mountains and the Rio Grande, has been a crossroads for commerce and travel since the sixteenth century and a home to Native Americans from prehistoric times through the present. El Paso Del Norte or the Pass of the North has always been a traveled route, a point of entry and a meeting place that holds the collected history and interwoven cultures of its residents and visitors.

As my inspiration and reference, I used an El Paso city map and began tracing neighborhoods, trains lines, schools, highways and significant places. I fabricated the forms with 14 gauge steel wire, which I then hand stitched using vintage fabrics. The utilitarian textiles of denim, mattress ticking and basic cottons used for grains sacks symbolize our basic needs, reference El Paso’s agricultural and textile industries while celebrating the citizens who make El Paso a home.