Fold: Woven in the fabric of Space Time, weaving by Pam McKinlay, various grades monofilament and fishing braids. Hand woven on 8-shaft table loom, double weave technique, Light box 990x660mm. PHOTO: EM DAVIDSONPam McKinlay’s passion for art and science is seen every year in an annual exhibition she curates featuring local artists’ responses to scientists’ work. The multidisciplinary artist talks to Rebecca Fox about her own responses. Maths does not come easily for many artistic folks. So when Dunedin artist Pam McKinlay starts talking about data, graphs, calculations and physics I’m puzzled. I am here to talk about her latest weaving project but it turns out I was in for a maths lesson as weaving is all about maths — especially complicated, difficult weaving. And McKinlay is all about complicated and difficult. It has taken her 10 years to hone her skills to a level to attempt her latest project — a colourful, light-reflecting twisted helix-type drape that defies gravity. Dunedin artist Pam McKinlay. The maths involved in making her dream a reality required more than six weeks of calculations, even joining a maths forum in Arizona for help. ‘‘It nearly broke my brain.’’ But she backed herself despite being advised to do it a different way. ‘‘I knew it could be done but to do it this way was a bit of mind bender.’’ To create what she envisioned, she stepped out of her comfort zone and into a fishing supplies store to purchase fishing braid wanting its transparency and luminosity despite preferring to use recycled materials for her work. It required the work to be hand woven on a 12-shaft table loom in four distinct layers. Each layer interleaves with the others while remaining separate. The woven planes were held under tension during construction so McKinlay did not know until she released it after two months of weaving if it had worked. But once released the textile settled into ‘‘subtle hills, valleys and curves’’. ‘‘I did a happy dance. I was really relieved.’’ Every year for the Art + Science exhibition McKinlay asks artists to respond to the work of scientists, pairing them up to see what comes of the collaboration. This year the theme is time with 29 contributions from artists and scientists exploring the many ways time is sensed, measured and recorded. McKinlay asked them to consider a Carlo Rovelli quote ‘‘Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us?’’ ‘‘You have to find a way to respond and express your ideas and very often it results in a new way to make,’’ she says. This work, while not directly responding to a scientist’s project, did have a scientific base. ‘‘These transformations respond to visualisations of gravitational waves and geodesics and to the geometry of curved spacetime in Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. In this way, the weaving becomes a material analogue of distortion— registering movement, force and relation.’’ Once the weaving finished, the work continued as an important part of the project was how it would look when illuminated. Pam McKinlay's weaving in progress on a 12-shaft table loom, four separate layers, 10 shuttles in play. PHOTOS: SUPPLIED With the help of photographer and technician Emily Davidson, a ‘‘lighting genius’’, McKinlay has been able to illuminate the textile with a single point of light, projecting a shadow through and between the layers. ‘‘As viewers move around the work, changing intersections of light and material continually reconfigure depth, rhythm and topology.’’ The piece is a finalist in the New Zealand Contemporary Textile Art Awards in Nelson and is being exhibited alongside the other finalists meaning it it unable to be displayed in the Dunedin exhibition. ‘‘I’m super proud of this, it’s nice to have recognition of your weaving.’’ Achieving the result she had in her mind is a great feeling of satisfaction for McKinlay who started weaving 15 years ago. She went along to a weaving class to support friend Christine Keller and became ‘‘addicted’’. ‘‘We got an amazing grounding in weaving, structure and drafting.’’ Weaving has allowed her to share stories and ideas as well as create beautiful things and bringing attention to climate change issues has always been important to her. Pam McKinlay, Woven panel, Biodiversity Loss 1970–2022. Organic cotton warp, silk, vintage kimono silk and rayon weft, hand woven. 1890x450mm One of her other projects in the exhibition are the ‘‘biodiversity stripes’’ woven panels. To create these McKinlay has converted Living Planet Index data — ‘‘I love data’’ — of biodiversity loss from 1970 to 2022 into the woven structure. ‘‘Ecological decline is held materially in fragile fibres made into a delicate surface rather than remaining as abstract measure.’’ She weaves the panels by hand from organic cotton warp, silk, vintage kimono silk from the 1870s-1890s and rayon weft, hand woven. ‘‘I like to use waste minimisation in my practice when I can. If I make anything I like to think about how the object will be decommissioned.’’ Her other project Warping Time: Memory of Rocks is a sculptural and woven installation of studies where a vertical column, representing the axis mundi, supports a family tree of floating continental shelves. It was inspired after going along to a talk by scientist Simon Cox and it triggering a memory of collecting rocks on the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland when she was 26 years old. ‘‘I always pick up rocks when I go places and I very much liked this rock on Barra but had to leave it behind.’’ Studies for Memory of Rocks, shown here as works in progress. Many years later she found another similar rock in Westland. ‘‘I wanted to know about my rock, I was super interested in its history.’’ So she created a woven panel reflecting the strata of the rock and then folded it to create a rock. The rocks have been placed on the axis, reminiscent of a weaver’s warp beam. Staggered shelves extend from the column at irregular intervals, ‘‘in a kind of continental family tree’’, marking fragments and tectonic shifts from Pangaea to the breakup of Gondwana. ‘‘Behind the column an image explores the irregular layering and fractural stresses within the rock strata, echoing the textures and unpredictable deformation of tectonic forces in nature.’’ McKinlay has also created a series of ceramic ‘‘shells’’ inspired by shell middens. ‘‘The English word ‘‘midden’’ comes from Old Norse, meaning a heap of waste. These sites are much more than rubbish: they are layered records of coastal life.’’ Sheks, bisqued clay, work in progress. Molded ceramics by Pam McKinlay and Jessie James Pickery. McKinlay has inscribed the ‘‘shells’’ with a word from several haiku contributed by archaeologists. Visitors to the gallery will be encouraged to write their own haiku-like poems with the shells. For McKinlay, who has curated these exhibitions since the end of 2017, this exhibition fit into a bigger idea which she thinks of as ‘‘a whakapapa of space-time’’. ‘‘By this I mean a framework for understanding relationships across generations, places, species, events and environments. It reminds us that nothing exists in isolation.’’ A whakapapa of space-time invites people to think across multiple scales simultaneously such as family histories, migration journeys, ecological relationships, planetary processes and cosmic origins. ‘‘What interests me is that both Indigenous relational worldviews and contemporary science increasingly describe a profoundly interconnected universe, albeit through different languages and methodologies. Both tell stories about origins, relationships and belonging.’’ She believes thinking through a whakapapa of space-time allows people to connect these scales ‘‘from stardust to settlement, from galaxies to migration routes, from ancestral histories to future generations’’. ‘‘Ultimately, that is why I continue to work in art and science. Both are practices of paying attention. Both help us understand our place within larger systems of relationship. And both offer ways of learning, imagining, and acting together in a time when connection, curiosity and collective responsibility have never been more important.’’ To see ‘‘Once Upon a Time — Now, Then, Where, When’’, Dunedin Community Gallery, July 12-17; Floor talk curator Pam McKinlay July 14, 2pm. Art + Science Panel, Nano Fest 2026, July 15, 5.30-7pm Te Whare o Rukutia, Dunedin
