Constant Craving

Courtney Coombs' Constant Craving (2023) represents the culmination of their Master of Fine Arts project at the University of Bergen, exploring queer methodologies through digital weaving practices using a practice-based reflexive approach that prioritises experimentation, failure, and material collaboration over predetermined outcomes. This research centres on queer-centric, anti-spectacular methodologies that privilege observation, uncertainty, and everyday encounters, positioning the work within Coombs' broader investigation of how small, everyday moments can be at the centre of communication between artist, materials, and viewer. Coombs specifically examines the potential for digital weaving to function as inherently queer – part human, part machine, employing earnestness as queer method through a deliberate shift from conceptual criticality towards authentic engagement with lived experience. Their methodology encompasses queer feminist frameworks involving abstraction and recontextualisation, practice-based experimentation with digital loom technology, and collaborative human-machine processes that disrupt conventional notions of artistic control. The work demonstrates Coombs' return to textiles after fifteen years of conceptual practice, engaging specifically with digital loom weaving as a site of queer collaboration and landscape abstraction using photographs from Pismo Beach California. Drawing on David Getsy's theories of queer abstraction, Coombs positions this work within practices that emerge from a suspicion of representation and a desire to find a more open and variable mode of imaging and imagining relations, while engaging with John Paul Morabito's positioning of tapestry as situated tangentially to mainstream art discourse. The work's title and conceptual framework reference k.d. lang's 1992 song Constant Craving – about birth and death and desire and longing – released the same year she came out publicly, providing both personal resonance and broader commentary on queer visibility and authenticity. Constant Craving consists of three handwoven textile pieces hanging from the gallery ceiling with rope and aluminium rods, accompanied by three kiln-cast glass objects resting on the floor, with one textile incorporating the camouflaged handwritten text constant craving. The work functions as an anti-monumental response to the monumentality of the natural world – a humble nod to the awe-inspiring moments that present themselves as we navigate the land that we are simply borrowing. Coombs' research contributes to contemporary discourse on queer art practices beyond traditional aesthetics, digital craft methodologies, and earnestness and vulnerability as legitimate artistic strategies, challenging narrow representations of queerness in gallery contexts and demonstrating how traditional craft practices can be queered through digital technology.