Sasha Baskin



Sasha Baskin

About The Artist

Sasha Baskin • Baltimore, MD
Fiber & Textiles • CUSTOM COMMISSIONS

I am a weaver and lacemaker rendering woven pixels and bobbin lace bitmapped images. I explore reality television as a modern mythological system worthy of its own mythic tapestries. I weave screenshots like chapters in a hero’s journey and overlay lace grids to create veiled goddesses out of reality television starlets. Exploring line, color, and tone through thread, structure, and texture, I incorporate the repetitive structure of myth into the very fabric of their representation.



Connect

Instagram
Artist website
Email

Q&A with the Artist

Tell us how your work is made.

Bobbin lace is addicting. I'm in love with the cross and the twist and the endless intersections and overlaps. I scour the media surrounding me until I find a screenshot or a moment that feels particularly grand and mythic, or a figure that feels particularly relevant to a greek goddess or myth I've been reading. I translate that image and that figure into a weaving or lace pattern and fall in love with the impossibly intricate ways that thread can overlap and interact to create line, tone, and value.


What makes you passionate about the medium you work with?

I am impossibly patient. I love slow and repetitive processes. I find them meditative and incredibly satisfying to create and complete. I love making my work as small and intricate as possible and challenging myself to find new ways to create careful and complicated interactions of thread, value, light and shadow.

What is something unique about you or your practice?

In 2020 I worked with an applied mathematician to explore the overlap between bobbin lace and mathematical systems. He helped me create my first bobbin lace pattern based on a digital image using computer programming and torus forms. I taught him the basics of bobbin lace and he taught me the basics of complete systems in applied mathematics. This work has impacted my teaching at Johns Hopkins University. I teach bobbin lace to math and science students and explore how repetitive structures overlap with STEM disciplines.