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“Wind Maps” by Diane Ward — up now through October 28th at Right Window, 992 Valencia in San Francisco. 

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Curated by Laura Moriarty

Interview with Diane Ward by Laura Moriarty in relation to “Wind Maps” at Right Window, October, 2025

LM: How were these pieces made? Embroidery is evident. I love the way you’ve rendered the wind (isobars?). Is weaving also involved? My feeling about your use of this medium is that it is both intimate and powerful. Why did you choose textiles as a way of thinking about the wind?

DW: I have been working with embroidery, quilting, appliqué and other ways to use textiles and stitching for a long time; I draw with thread and needle. My mother taught me to sew from a very early age, she and her mother sewed. I do, too. It is intimate -- done by hand according to ability and personal perception. The objects produced when sewing are beyond art commodities because they are clothing, coverings, blankets that are part of the process of the reproduction of labor. That is a part of the power, along with embodying affect due to the intimate touch of the hands on the work. These pieces take a long time to make and so they require me to engage in arrested movement, like a wind map. I am still in order to capture the wind' which is stopped in time in the wind snapshot.

 LM: In the poem, “Grab the wind,” included in the show, you invoke “voice” which I now experience as part of the “ecosystem” of the work, another word from the poem. I “hear” the wind despite seeing the pieces inside a glassed-in room and in photos. Am I right to think that? What is the ecosystem of the work?

DW: Ecosystem is integrated and inclusive. It is fluid and dynamic. "my voice," as part of this ecosystem is one among many aural expressions. I never thought of my poetry or artwork as something outside of my life as a whole but every part of my existence contributes somehow. I couldn't actually do this work if it wasn't embedded in my life within a mutually-dependent context of all the "things" I can perceive. During the pandemic lockdown, I participated in a food distribution organized by Common Vision, a nonprofit in Oakland. Wanda Stewart, the executive director, encouraged me to take food even though I said I lived in a house with 6 other people and we had enough. She said if I wanted to be a part of the distribution, I needed to take as well as to give. I think that is a good illustration and metaphor for this concept of ecosystem, as well as a commitment to inclusion and social justice.

The wind maps hang precariously from the ceiling. They are not stable, each one hangs at its own angle of off-centeredness. This contributes to the sense of movement. They are like flags that innervate the surrounding space when they are moved by elements of the surrounding space. I think they are indicators of movement, not representation. The iconography on them is taken from wind maps (particularly snapshots of them from the East Bay and upper Sacramento Valley areas) and, while each one is unique, the colors of thread and stitches are flow across all of them.  I am trying to encourage the eye to travel across the different pieces and yet see the movement as one. They are hung according to overall size, with the largest in the foreground and the smallest at the back of the window next to the moon. This is in order to accentuate the feeling of movement, each individual map depicts movement and the installation, as a whole, also indicates movement.

LM: Can you comment on the gorgeous gold patch, with its stitched figure, attached to the framed piece above the poem?

DW: That was the first wind map that I made. Carolie Parker invited me to contribute to a show, Fictional Press Poetry, in February 2025, at 515 Bendix Gallery in Los Angeles. The show included poets who also make visual art as well as some poet-visual artist collaborators. It was meant, in part, to be a space that included artists who had suffered losses in the Eaton Fire in Altadena. I have been taking photographs of shadows thrown by trees and other plants for a while; the gold patch is a piece of wool that I dyed using chamomile in a workshop with Makeshift Center for Material Studies (thanks to the amazing Karin Dahl and Alli Sheridan!). I stitched an abstracted image of one of the tree shadows onto it. I love that you call it a "figure." This reinforces my framing of an inclusive ecosystem in which all elements interact to create the whole.

LM: The handmade moon is an allusion and producer of “shadows” for me as a viewer. (“Shadows” being, again, one of the words in the poem.) This moon seems not abstract or mythic but realistic and practical. Connected to that perception, for me, “Grab the wind,” appears to be about language, science, experience, and the presentation of knowledge, among many other possibilities. The cloth pieces seem to comprise a universe of wind, trees, stars, the moon, and the lines created by measuring the wind, as well as other forces that affect our lives. These forces currently include the catastrophic firing of NOAA scientists. I guess this observation goes back to the ecosystem question.  Is the ecosystem of this work threatened? Are we?

DW: Oh well, I suppose everything is threatened all the time and yet we're slippery and can choose to shift, so who knows? As many of my friends know, I practice "worst case scenario," a childhood artifact, and mostly don't arrive at that particular end game. The only thing that is the end of the world is the end of the world.

The waxing gibbous moon, along with the cypress tree, is on a piece of cloth that will eventually be a lawn blanket for my step-grandchild. It hangs on the wall in my office between sessions of working on it. I included it in the show for 2 reasons: I realize (ecosystem again) that everything I'm doing (my poetry, my jobs, my life choices, my parenting, my visual work . . .) is of-a-piece; and I wanted something to function as a visual focal point for the wind maps.

Review: “Laura Moriarty, Which Walks,” by rob mclennan, rob mclennan’s blog, May 21, 2025

Essay: “Portrait of Norma Cole,” in That Tongue Be Time: Norma Cole and a Continuous Making, edited by Dale Smith, University of New Mexico Press, 2025

Laura Moriarty will read from Which Walks on Thursday May 15 at 7:00 PM at Tally Ho! Books, 3941 Piedmont Ave. in Oakland.

Which Walks is a unique and exciting collection “documenting (and interrogating) the poet’s daily walks. [It] investigates the twin practices of walking and art-making while aging. Intensely feminist, Moriarty’s book relates to the endlessly unfinished journeys of Nathaniel Mackey’s long poems, as well as to the dailiness of many writers from Charles Baudelaire to Robert Creeley. These poems are an extension of the author’s visual practice, which she is returning to after a fifty-year break.”

Also featured is author Eric Sneathen, whose collection Don’t Leave Me This Way “queers the sonnet by placing a different kind of impossible love at its center: the dead of the AIDS era, whose archives so infuse these lines that our shared history comes alive.”

This is the first of three events at Tally Ho! Books to celebrate Nightboat Books’ extraordinary 20 years of vital work in small press publishing.

The Poetry I Felt Was Walking: Brett Goodroad and Laura Moriarty in Conversation is on The Back Room at Small Press Traffic. (4/18/2023)

https://www.smallpresstraffic.org/the-back-room-article/the-poetry-i-felt-was-walking-brett-goodroad-and-laura-moriarty-in-conversation