Congratulations Fall 2023 Crit Lab Fellow Serena Buschi!

Serena Buschi’s bejeweled waves of webs, nets, silks, and saris weave passionate interconnected forms of women’s familial histories, in looping, hanging, draping, bodies responsive to every breath as underlying grids hold their disparate joys together.

The influences that inform my work are both cultural and dialectic. The basis of all my work stems from how identity is formed and fused into what seems to be a tightly woven construct. The processes of collaging fragments, weaving, pinning, and draping have mirrored how my own identity is constructed, and further, this process allows me to understand the larger context, where the identity of society, politics, and ecology are interrelated and the power relationships therein.

My work often includes three overarching frameworks: grid, waveform, and weight. The grid I see as a universal underlying structure, where everything is interrelated and housed. I use wave patterns as a metaphor for interconnectivity that pertains to socio-political and socio-ecological relationships both personal and collective. I weave, crochet, and embroider to mend these relationships with healing intentions. I think about the weight often present in my work as generational, where trauma has carryover. It encompasses the physicality of weight variations speaking to restrictions of the body’s physicality and mass and the desire to be free of them.

Materially, I choose fiber to reference a way of knowing, based on a comfort connected to my own familiarity with cloth and the lasting impression cloth has had in my life. Sari silk speaks of my memory and my identity and more specifically to the array of unashamed vibrancy of the saris worn by the women in my life. I use fiber and printmaking to collage, weaving, and embroidering with varying substrates. I repurpose and restructure these to create nets, objects, paper quilts, and fiber paintings to recognize our collective unity and the relationships we have with each other.