Interview: Rising Star Jasmine Wright

I've never felt comfortable being defined by a single medium. My grandmother was a quilter, so textiles were my first artistic language, but I studied digital media in college and worked briefly in fashion photography. I think my interdisciplinary approach emerged naturally from following my curiosity.

There was a pivotal moment about five years ago when I was working on a traditional embroidery piece and felt frustrated by its limitations. I started experimenting with projecting digital images onto the textile surface, and suddenly the work had this new dimension—it could change, respond, and exist in multiple states. That revelation opened up everything for me.

I think we're in an exciting time where the boundaries between analog and digital, craft and technology, are dissolving. I'm interested in that liminal space where different approaches converge.

Collection is a central part of my practice. I'm drawn to objects that carry traces of their past lives—fabric scraps from abandoned factories, photographs from estate sales, discarded technology. These materials already contain stories, and I'm interested in honoring those while weaving them into new narratives.

I keep an extensive archive in my studio organized by type, color, and era. Some objects wait years before finding their place in a piece. Others immediately trigger an idea. I try to maintain a balance between intentional gathering and serendipitous discovery.

There's an ethical dimension to this practice as well. By repurposing existing materials, I'm responding to overconsumption and waste. Each found object represents something that wasn't newly manufactured for my art.

Memory has always fascinated me—how malleable it is, how it shapes identity, how it exists at both personal and cultural levels. I lost my father when I was young, and much of my early work was an attempt to preserve memories of him that were already fading.

With "Threads of Memory," I wanted to expand beyond personal narrative to explore how communities remember and forget. The exhibition coincided with the demolition of the textile factory where my grandmother worked for 30 years. I collected materials from the building before it was destroyed and incorporated them into the work.

The digital elements in that exhibition—the projected images that shift and degrade over time—speak to the impermanence of memory. As technology changes, we lose access to earlier digital archives. There's a parallel between the way memory fades and the way digital information becomes inaccessible.

With a mix of determination and bewilderment, honestly! The past few years have been surreal. I spent nearly a decade making work with very little external validation, and that period was crucial for developing my voice without pressure.

What changed things for me was finding a community of artists and curators who understood what I was trying to do. My first show at a small artist-run space led to connections that eventually brought my work to wider attention. I've been fortunate to work with a gallery that genuinely supports my vision rather than trying to shape it to market demands.

The challenging part has been maintaining creative focus amid increased visibility. There's a pressure to produce more, faster, and to repeat what's been successful. I've had to be intentional about protecting my process and continuing to take risks.

I'm also conscious of using whatever platform I have to advocate for other artists, particularly those working outside traditional art centers or without institutional access. The art world remains deeply unequal in many ways.

My process tends to be cyclical rather than linear. I usually begin with a period of research and collection—reading, visiting archives, gathering materials, taking photographs. I fill notebooks with fragmented thoughts, sketches, and material samples.

Rather than planning a piece completely before executing it, I prefer to establish a framework and then respond intuitively to what emerges. I'll often work on multiple pieces simultaneously, allowing them to inform each other.

The textile components typically come first—weaving, stitching, dyeing—creating the physical foundation. Then I introduce the digital elements, which might involve projection mapping, embedded screens, or conductive thread that triggers audio or visual content when touched.

There's always a period of testing and refining the interaction between physical and digital elements. This is often where the most interesting discoveries happen—when materials or technologies behave in unexpected ways.

I rarely consider a work truly finished. Even after exhibition, I might continue to evolve a piece. Some works are deliberately designed to change over time, either through natural material degradation or programmed digital transformation.

I draw inspiration from such a range of sources. Among historical figures, Louise Bourgeois has been foundational—her material sensibility, her psychological depth, and her late-career evolution inspire me enormously. The textile innovator Anni Albers and the assemblage artist Joseph Cornell are also important touchstones.

Among contemporary artists, I admire El Anatsui's monumental textile-adjacent works, Pipilotti Rist's immersive installations, and Trevor Paglen's investigations of technology and surveillance. Nam June Paik's pioneering video art continues to feel revolutionary to me.

Beyond visual art, I'm influenced by speculative fiction writers like Octavia Butler and Ted Chiang, who explore how technology shapes human experience. Experimental musicians like Holly Herndon, who works with AI, have also influenced my thinking about human-machine collaboration.

And I can't overstate the influence of the traditional textile artists in my family and community, whose names won't appear in art history books but whose technical mastery and visual intelligence I aspire to match.

I'm interested in the continuities between traditional craft and new technologies rather than seeing them as opposites. Weaving, for instance, is fundamentally algorithmic—it's a system of binary decisions that create pattern. The Jacquard loom, with its punch cards, directly influenced early computing. There's a rich historical dialogue between textile production and technological development.

What draws me to both traditional craft and digital tools is their capacity for complexity through relatively simple means. A basic loom can create incredibly complex structures; similarly, relatively simple code can generate intricate patterns and behaviors.

I'm also interested in how both craft and technology encode knowledge and memory. Traditional textile techniques preserve cultural knowledge across generations, while digital technologies store and transmit information in new ways. Both are vulnerable to loss in different ways—traditional knowledge through cultural disruption, digital information through technological obsolescence.

Rather than using technology to simply document or represent craft traditions, I'm looking for genuine integration where each influences the other. Sometimes that means using digital tools to extend traditional techniques beyond their physical limitations. Other times it means applying the principles of craft—materiality, tacit knowledge, embodied process—to digital creation.

The early years were difficult financially. I was working multiple jobs while trying to maintain a studio practice. Time and energy were always in short supply. I think many artists face this struggle, and there's no easy solution—I just had to be incredibly disciplined about carving out creative time, even if it was just a few hours a week.

Another significant challenge was finding my voice in a art world that often seemed to value certain approaches over others. My work didn't fit neatly into categories—it wasn't "pure" textile art or digital media. I've learned to embrace that hybridity rather than trying to simplify my practice to fit existing frameworks.

Working with technology presents its own challenges. Technical failures are inevitable, especially with interactive elements. I've had projectors fail during exhibitions and custom software crash on opening night. These experiences have taught me to build redundancy into my systems and to sometimes embrace glitches as part of the work.

Perhaps the most persistent challenge is managing self-doubt. Even with external validation, I still question my work constantly. I've come to see this critical voice as part of my creative process rather than an obstacle to it. The doubt keeps me pushing further.

I'm currently developing a body of work that explores collective memory and climate change. I'm collecting textiles and objects from communities affected by flooding and incorporating them into pieces that also use data visualization techniques to represent changing weather patterns. There's a responsive element where the digital projections react to atmospheric conditions in the exhibition space.

I'm also experimenting with bioplastics and growing my own textile materials. I'm interested in how sustainable materials might themselves become part of the conceptual content of the work.

Looking further ahead, I'm excited about developments in haptic technology that might allow new forms of tactile interaction with digital elements. I'm also intrigued by the potential of blockchain for creating provenance records that document the origin of found materials.

Whatever form my work takes, I expect to continue exploring the intersection of materiality and digital experience, and the ways we preserve and transmit memory across time and technological change.

First, I'd say be patient with the process of finding your voice. Working across disciplines means you're essentially creating your own language, and that takes time to develop. Don't worry if your early work feels disjointed or derivative—keep pushing through.

Second, build a strong foundation in the traditional aspects of your chosen media before focusing on technological innovation. Understanding material properties, historic techniques, and formal principles will inform your work regardless of how experimental it becomes.

Third, find communities in each of the disciplines you're engaging with, not just in the art world. My conversations with textile artisans, software developers, and electronic musicians have been as valuable as my dialogue with other visual artists.

Fourth, document your process meticulously, especially when working with technology that may become obsolete. Future-proof your work as much as possible by considering how it might be preserved or translated into new forms.

Finally, embrace the uncertainty and contradictions in your practice. The most interesting work often emerges from productive tension between different approaches, materials, or ideas. Trust that the connections will reveal themselves over time, even if they're not immediately apparent.