The artist Qualeasha Wood can make a computer glitch look mythic. She distorts her likeness freely in her large-scale recycled cotton jacquard tapestries, which are machine- and hand-embroidered and beaded with webcam and iPhone self-portraits, as well as snapshots of memes, early aughts-style desktop screens and other digital ephemera, each pixel represented by a stitch. Sometimes she layers dozens of pictures of her face, smearing her eyes, cheeks and lips into one another. In a few of the tapestries in her new solo show, which opens this week at London’s Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, the artist poses in lingerie, but parts of her body are erased, cropped or censored by heavy pixelation. Choppy text — a mix of computer code and poetry — runs across the malfunctioning images. The color scheme is mostly blues and greens, as though Wood, 28, were lounging underwater.
“It’s important to conceal or play with the level of vulnerability,” says the Philadelphia-based artist. As a queer Black woman, she says, she wants to “talk about the position that people put me in — but I want to come out on top.” To that end, Wood often turns to satire, as in her 2021 tapestry “The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex,” which was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022, making Wood, then 24, one of the youngest to be added to its permanent collection. That work and others were in part inspired by her feeling “scapegoated and exalted at the same time” during online arguments about race and the Black Lives Matter movement, she says. In the tapestry, below Wood’s stoic selfies, a pop-up window declares, “Young hot ebony is online; enter salvation.” “I narrow in on a problem and like to really poke at it,” Wood says. In other words, she likes to troll.
Wood started developing her practice as an undergraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design, when one of her teachers reacted to her work about racial identity by repeatedly telling her that his class “wasn’t social studies,” she says. She was immediately energized, thinking, “Now I realize that you guys hate this, I’m just going to keep doing it!”
But she came to textiles earnestly. During a school break, she visited her paternal grandmother, who covered her with a jacquard blanket woven with baby photos of Wood and her brother and cousins. While at RISD, the artist, who grew up in a one-bedroom New Jersey apartment, was working three jobs. Still, her mother worried about her becoming elitist in such a privileged environment. “My parents [couldn’t] relate to my art anymore,” she says. She started making jacquard pieces because, more than anything, they brought her back home. “I loved that when I was showing them for the first time, people would say, ‘I’ve seen this before,’” Wood recalls. “‘I recognize this.’”
