The Vestibule is a good name for where this show is opening. A vestibule sits between inside and outside. It’s the room you pass through on your way somewhere else, and it belongs to both sides of the door at once. Threaded by Language, which is on exhibit in The Vestibule in Ballard until September 19, lives in that kind of space too. It sits between a mother tongue and an adopted one, between a newspaper’s one-day news cycle and its second life as yarn, between a postcard’s original sender and the hand that later stitched into it.
The show brings together three artists whose lives all crossed continents: Gabriela Nirino from Argentina, CLaire Renaut from a French-German household, and Shin Yu Pai, a Taiwanese American poet and visual artist, around a shared, unglamorous material fact: that cloth, thread, and paper remember. Handspun yarn made from cast-off copies of The Seattle Times. Vintage postcards, embroidered. Stitches tracing a mother’s handwritten alphabet. None of it is decorative. All of it is an argument about what gets carried, what gets lost, and what a pair of hands can do about the difference.
How three strangers became a show
The origin story is a very casual serendipitous event. A few years ago, Pai and Renaut sat on a panel together at the Alliance Française, part of a Nights of Ideas program organized by the Villa Albertine. The topic was in-betweenness and transformative creative space. Renaut showed a video of herself spinning thread out of New York Times pages. Pai remembers being struck by what the technique implied: a daily, disciplined act of transforming the news of the world into something personal.
Nirino was in the audience that night. She was already a textile artist, and already a friend of Renaut’s through the Surface Design Association. She introduced herself to Pai afterward. “I met CLaire because we both belong to the Surface Design Association,” Nirino said. “As Shin Yu explained, they shared a presentation at the Alliance Française. I went there to see CLaire, and I was very impressed by Shin Yu’s presentation. My first degree was in Linguistics… I love how she integrates visual elements and written poetry.” She wrote to Pai. Pai visited her home studio. Over time, through studio visits, emails, and actual letters, a friendship took shape.
Renaut can’t pin down the exact moment she and Nirino met. “It felt as if we had known each other forever right from the beginning,” she says. She remembers Pai’s talk that night with total clarity. “I admire her incredible way with words. Her writing and poetry, even her text messages, are so full of meaning and depth.”
For roughly a year before the show came together physically, the three worked at a distance. They traded photographs, letters, and small modified pieces of cloth, a correspondence inspired directly by the artist collaboration book I Send You This Cadmium Red, by John Berger and John Christie. Nirino visited Renaut’s studio with her own pieces a few months before the exhibition, to sort out how the work would hang and how the three practices would sit in the same room. The friendship came first, long before any curator got involved. The show grew out of it.
The title that took a month
Before Threaded by Language, there were a lot of other titles, and the ones that got rejected say almost as much as the one that stuck.
Over the course of a month, the three worked through words in three languages: disparition, effacement, veladura, vanishing, esfumar, disipar, palimpsest, evanescente. Renaut proposed “Palimpseste: Rewriting Languages Thread by Thread.” Nirino suggested “Woven by Language.” At one point they even considered giving each artist her own separate title.
Disparition, French for disappearance, went first. “I rejected disparition because in Spanish it is linked to the people disappeared by the dictatorship government in the period ’76 to ’83,” Nirino explained. That word, los desaparecidos, is politically radioactive in Argentina. The group wanted a title that would hold its meaning across languages instead of detonating in one of them.
Nirino’s own suggestion came from Jacques Lacan’s idea that we are “spoken by language,” that the structures of language shape identity and the unconscious mind before we ever open our mouths. “That was for me the idea that guided my work in the exhibition,” she said, “the perception I have when I use a language that is not my mother tongue, that the world I build with this other language is a different one.”
In the end it was Pai who proposed “threaded.” She chose it deliberately, since weaving isn’t part of her own practice. The word lets each artist’s very different relationship to fiber sit inside the same title, without any one of them claiming to define it.
Claire Renaut: What the newspaper remembers
Renaut’s material is unglamorous and close at hand: the daily newspaper. She spins it into yarn, letter by letter, page by page. “I do not destroy the newspapers,” she said. “Rather I transform them. I elevate them to a new level of distinction.”
For this show, the newspaper is The Seattle Times, a departure from the project she’s best known for: yarn spun from pages of The New York Times that her family kept for a decade after September 11, 2001. “The yarn from 9/11 is spun from pages of the New York Times that my family carried for the decade since September 11, 2001,” she said. “Transforming the pages of these papers into textile was both an act of remembrance and release.”
Spinning The Seattle Times feels different to her, quieter and more personal. “Spinning the Seattle Times feels different because it was the first newspaper I could truly read and understand,” Renaut said. By the time she started reading it, she had grown fluent not just in the language but in American culture and vernacular. There’s even a physical difference. “Compared to the New York Times, the ink doesn’t bleed onto my spinning wheel or my fingers.” It’s simply the newspaper of the city where she’s lived the longest.
Language shapes which newspapers she picks up in the first place. “Language is the primary criterion,” she said. But she’s also drawn to papers in languages she doesn’t speak, gathered on her travels. There, not understanding becomes part of the work. “I enjoy not knowing what the content is about,” she said. “Not-reading becomes an act.”
Asked whether spinning text into illegibility counts as erasure, preservation, or translation, Renaut turns the question aside. “When I spin the newspaper, I alter the text, but the letters and words are still legible,” she said. “The material itself becomes something else. It is neither an act of erasure nor a means of preservation. One might call it translation, but I prefer the terms transformation or transmutation, much like alchemists seeking to turn lead into gold.”
That framing tracks with Renaut’s own biography. German was her mother’s language, the language of her childhood. French was her father’s, the language of her adolescence and school years. English came last, the language of the person she married and of her adult life. Three languages, three people, three inheritances, and she spins each one into thread by hand. It’s slow work, and she believes that’s the appeal. “This slow process is what I like the most,” she said. “Using old technology as opposed to new ones is a statement for me.” In her studio hangs a drawing of a woman walking barefoot, smelling flowers, holding a snail on a leash that moves too fast for her. For Renaut, “This is inspirational.”
Gabriela Nirino: A world without Ñ
Nirino intentionally chooses to work with natural materials: corn husk, burlap, beads, and thread. “Textiles are historically nomadic,” she said. “You roll your carpet, your tent, and travel with them. You walk and spin, like the women who take care of the animals in the Andes do.”
Nirino has written that weaving means building a small world almost out of nothing, a world you can carry with you. In this show, that idea reads less like a metaphor and more like a survival strategy. She wrote an accompanying text for two pieces, “Bags to Carry My Story Between Two Lands” and “Travelling Chuspa,” a chuspa being a traditional Andean woven bag. A prose poem she calls “The Petates” lays out the idea plainly:
Wherever I go, I unroll my duffel, gently arrange my treasures: balls of yarn, husk leaves, weeds that I find around, little pieces of wood that become a loom. I sit down, I weave, I’m home. My land, my South America, is portable. Sister me with those who emigrated (and emigrate), with those who spin while walking forever.I work with what I have, I settle on any floor, I rescue what is forgotten. Slowly I separate fiber by fiber, slowly I cross-link them. Slowly, but without pause, I keep walking.
The corn husk carries specific weight for her. Chala, from the indigenous Quechua people and language, is a material made from maize she has worked with before in her CHALA project. It’s an apparent waste, she has said, that quietly protects the earth and generates energy once it’s returned to the field. In this show it turns up in some of the bags, though she’s quick to say it isn’t the main idea. The main idea is silence. “It is part of who you are as a migrant,” she says. “There are so many things you cannot say, you don’t know how to say.” She points to the Argentine writer Sylvia Molloy, who has written that one always writes from an absence, that choosing a language means postponing another.
That absence has a name in one of the show’s most direct pieces: A World Without Ñ. Its burlap contains drawn thread made by intentionally pulling out threads, forming the words Nirino loses every time she types on an English keyboard, where Ñ collapses into “NI.” Cariño (dear). Extraño (miss). Año (year). Ñandú (rhea). Puño (fist). A short list, but it carries a lot.
The same burlap holds I Am Not a Hispanic Alien, its letters fading on purpose, drawn from Nirino’s own experience filling out paperwork for legal residence and citizenship. “The obsession of putting you in a box,” she calls it. “The material holds my silence on that situation, my impossibility to be who I am, none of those categories.” That led to a third piece, a woven work in Braille called “Who Am I in English?” It asks the same question again, this time in a language you have to touch to read.
Not every piece in the show carries that same heaviness of subject. “Que encuentres tu hogar,” meaning “may you find your home,” began as part of a larger installation called How to Make Your Own Sanctuary, inspired by Gauchito Gil, a folk devotional figure honored at roadside shrines across Argentina and wherever Argentines have emigrated. The phrase itself came from an unlikely place: the last line of a poem, “Prayer From a Future Artifact,” that Nirino read on the back of an exhibition card for a show by the collective Parkeology. She believes that show involved a wall of objects recovered after an earthquake or some other disaster. “That sentence stuck with me,” she said. “Isn’t it the most wonderful thing, to find a home? To find your people?”
Her artist statement for the piece sums up the project as a whole. “If the homeland is language, I am in terra incognita,” she writes. “I speak English as if through a haze. Words land in uncertain, in-between zones. Weaving is my sign language: I move my hands, I intertwine yarns, and what is spoken turns into fiber. In this third language, silence, I inhabit the territory of intersecting threads, in the voids that yearn for connection.”
Shin Yu Pai: What a poem does when it can’t be heard
Pai’s work is the quietest departure from the show’s central material. “I decided not to use words or language in my work,” she said, “although I use writing systems and letter forms.” Her poems show up here as embroidery: text you trace with your eyes instead of hearing read aloud.
That move from oral to tactile sits close to the center of her practice generally. Pai holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Writing and an MA in Museology from the University of Washington, with a focus on oral history She created the audio story series Ten Thousand Things for KUOW Public Radio. Asked what a poem loses when it has to be touched instead of heard, she doesn’t accept the premise. “We can and can’t touch the embroidered poem. We touch it with our mind,” she said. “Nothing is lost in translation. We have to access the piece through the use of all of our senses. The mind steps back to allow sensory meaning and memory to emerge.”
Two embroidered alphabet pieces anchor her section of the show. One renders the Mandarin Chinese writing system, a language Pai never learned as a child. The other renders the Roman alphabet in her mother’s own cursive handwriting. Pai asked her mother to write it out, then traced the letters in thread. It’s the alphabet her mother had to learn from scratch as an adult, to read and write in English. “This work is very much about the matrilineal line,” Pai said.
The show’s third Pai piece, embroidered on a vintage postcard, is called Flower Clock. The reference has more than one layer. The 18th century scientist and so-called “father of taxonomy” Carl Linnaeus, once designed a horologium florae, a garden planted so that different flowers would open at different hours of the day and mark the time by bloom. Pai also points to Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, which looks at how time shows up differently in survivor trees, moss, labyrinths, and rose gardens. “This vintage postcard piece for me draws from many cycles of time layered upon time,” Pai said, “as well as the cycle of time that I carry within myself.” It could just as easily describe what it feels like to live inside more than one culture’s calendar at once.
Where their losses rhyme, and where they don’t
All three artists describe becoming a slightly different person depending on which language they’re speaking. “When I speak Taiwanese, I become more animated,” Pai said. She stopped learning the language as a child, so a childlike part of her comes forward when she tries to speak it now, “a sweet part that keeps things very simple.” Nirino notices the same shift from the other direction. “My husband says that I am nicer in English,” she said. “I smile when I don’t understand something. And I don’t have all the vocabulary I want, so I am not able to be sarcastic or use double meanings like in Spanish.” Renaut’s teenage daughter has noticed it too. “My daughter said that I am funnier in French than in English,” Renaut says, “that my French jokes do not translate well.”
They share a coping habit as well: agreeing when you’re not sure you understood. “Like most foreigners, I have a tendency to acquiesce when I am not sure I understood something,” Renaut said. “It is easier to answer yes than ask for clarification.”
Weaving, spinning, and embroidery are typically slow, repetitive, and historically dismissed as women’s work. The question is whether that slowness is itself part of the show’s argument, an answer to a moment when language gets produced instantly and thrown away just as fast. Here the three artists part ways in their approach to slowness.
For Pai, slowness was the whole point. “I turned off my devices, shut the door and cut out any distractions so that I could focus my full attention on what my hands were doing,” she said. She never learned to sew from her own mother, so every stitch took real, summoned effort, the kind of effort she imagines her mother spent learning to write in English.
Nirino resists making slowness the whole thesis of her work. “The slowness or speed were not an argument for me here,” she said. Her focus was matching technique to content: double weave for the experience of living between two languages, or drawn thread work, a technique that pulls threads out to leave gaps, for pieces about words disappearing and meaning going foggy, “like walking in an uncertain terrain.”
Renaut just loves the slowness for its own sake. “This slow process is what I like the most,” she said. “Using old technology as opposed to new ones is a statement for me.”
Their reading lists reveal
What an artist has been reading during a project often says more than a direct question can. The three read With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories by Nicole Nehrig together. Most of the work, Pai says, grew directly out of lived experience rather than books. “This work is very much alive for me, vs. drawn from books or other sources,” she says.
Nirino, who has a degree in linguistics, spent the preparation period in writing workshops, including one called Escribir la migración, Writing the Migration. “I feel like I am losing the Spanish,” she admits. Her list is wide-ranging. Sylvia Molloy’s Living Between Languages, written across English, Spanish, and French. Mónica Zwaig’s La Interlengua, about a Frenchwoman in Buenos Aires taking Italian lessons. Ágota Kristóf’s The Illiterate. Cecilia Vicuña’s Palabra e hilo / Word and Thread. And Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, an essay that centers the earliest human tool as a container, a bag, something that carries and holds, instead of a weapon. Given Nirino’s chuspas and duffels, it’s an easy fit.
Renaut’s list centers on the ache of a language you no longer live inside every day. Edgar Hilsenrath’s Berlin…Endstation. Maxim Leo’s Wo Wir Zu Hause Sind, or “Where We Are at Home.” Both books, she said, speak to the pull of nostalgia for the German language, “something I feel very strongly about.” She’s also been reading the philologist Heinz Wismann’s Penser entre les langues, on how France and Germany differ in language. And, like Pai and Nirino, Berger and Christie’s I Send You This Cadmium Red, the book that shaped the trio’s own correspondence over the past year. One that, she added, “I hope will continue on.”
What they hope visitors carry out
For all three artists, the show is really a record of a year spent talking to each other. Most of what’s on the walls didn’t exist a year ago. “Much of this artwork didn’t exist before,” Pai said. “We made it for the show, and through that process over the past year touched into themes that we were all thinking about in overlapping ways.” She hopes visitors “come away with some understanding of what it’s like to live outside your culture or cultures of origin, and a felt sense of cultural loss and bereavement, and what cannot be recovered.”
Asked what she hopes a second-generation visitor, someone who doesn’t speak their grandmother’s language, feels like doing on the way out the door, Pai points to the body. “Hands are not separate from the body are not separate from the mind,” she said. “Perhaps it begins with hearing language, listening to it… Maybe it starts with writing, or copying, a single word or character in one’s own handwriting in the source language.”
Nirino is hopeful about the generation coming up behind her own experience of loss. “The second generation are more relaxed about learning the language of their ancestors, because for them using that language doesn’t mean they are not integrated,” she said. “So I hope they are curious about how that language embodies a culture, and they look for ways to enjoy that part of their history, integrating it into the present and creating a very alive, evolving culture for the future.”
Renaut, thinking of her own daughter, comes to something close. “It is often toward the grandmother that they would turn to,” she said. “They represent the link to the past and the understanding of the present. Hopefully our exhibition will inspire anyone to do things with their hands.”
Threaded by Language runs August 8 to September 19, 2026, at The Vestibule.
