Francesca Capone: Grids in Utero, Grids in Bloom
—Cat Kron, October 2022

The prosaic textile proves itself both surprisingly resilient and supple enough to endlessly adapt to new circumstances, new needs. An unassuming tablecloth, content to be retired, folded and to lie patiently in a chest of drawers, will in all likelihood outlive the rest of the household. Throughout my childhood my mother kept a wooden trunk in the basement, full of scraps through which we periodically rifled but whose base I never saw. For Material Memory, Francesca Capone has raided the archives of her own matrilineal heritage and unearthed the material evidence of four generations of family who immigrated to New York from Sicily and worked in the city’s Garment District; their lives are inextricably intertwined with the textiles she uses in her paintings.

Capone pieces family heirlooms and well-loved items with her own scraps to create grids studded with floral prints, which she cuts and sutures into tessellated abstract fields. In her words, “This combination of fabric from my mother’s multigenerational collection with my own fabric forms a composite—a third entity, a visual dialogue between us that transcends time.” One might initially see a tension between the florals and grids. But what are flowers but mathematical strands of petals, repeating in ever accumulating patterns in an infinitely expanding print? Capone’s grids are, like the regenerative patterns of nature, subject to mutation and shift. In Mother from a Memory, a patchworked, repetitive composition—light blue on white, dark blue on white, and daisy print/pink gingham—made from clothes once worn by the artist’s mother and grandmother, includes one aberration in its upper left corner, a navy intrusion into a cerulean checkerboard. Necessitated by a lack of fabric to fill the frame, it draws attention to the careful handwork entailed in making this otherwise regular pattern.

Cloth is imprinted with the story of its handling, the “material memory” of the show’s title. While its tactility suggests a cozy, implicitly maternal domesticity—a mother’s hands feeding a sewing machine or pulling shirts from the dryer—even the wholly factory-produced garment has been touched at its inception, when its maker first hooks the warp yarn to the loom. Excess thread trimmed from looms is, in the world of textile production, termed “cast off”—an evocative and unsentimental descriptor for the byproduct of work so bound up with connotations of care. Capone is interested in reimagining the waste incurred at each stage of production of this otherwise profoundly economical material. For A Form of Memory, the sole sculpture in this show, she collected a year of such off cuts (another term I love for its visceral evocation of butchery), which she stuffed in a sheer casing and displayed on the floor. But unlike a collection of a year’s worth of food packaging, or diapers, single-use goods that might cumulatively serve only to admonish us for our unthinking consumption, Capone’s piece reminds us of fabric’s gameness to stick around, “to be washed, resewn, respun, shredded, stuffed”–in other words to slyly outlive us.

Weaving as alchemy. One fabricates objects just as one fabricates stories—either way, creating something from nothing, something that can take on a life of its own and live outside us, serving both our initial purposes and those we can’t yet anticipate.

Cat Kron is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Artsy, Art Review, BOMB, Contemporary Art Review LA, Cultured, Flash Art, Kaleidoscope, and Modern Painters, among others.