Sarah Rosalena: layer by layer
Make Room is proud to present Sarah Rosalena’s exhibition layer by layer: bringing together a new body of handwoven works that shift and collapse spatial dimensionality between landscape and atmosphere.
layer by layer coincides with the upcoming unveiling of Rosalena’s monumental textile commission for the new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and expands her ongoing investigation both conceptually and physically into weaving as a form of ecological mapping, where land, sky, and cosmos remain in constant relation, and constant flux. Dimension and form are observed in the micro and macro, offering views of complex weave structures and new, voluminous forms that blend basketry and textile.
Drafted digitally and entirely handwoven on the loom as single pieces, the exhibition transforms topographic references, satellite imagery and fixed geographic points into 3D layers of tactility: fields of shifting color fall away from and back into texture and visual depth. Dense weave structures, loosened floats, and intended interruptions within the grid create images that feel suspended between the earthen and the atmospheric, dissolving distinctions between land and sky, surface and depth.
Works begin with natural materials, including pine needles that are treated with natural dyes such as indigo before being incorporated into the weaving process. These organic elements move through digitally generated patterns and multi-layer structures, introducing irregularity, resistance, and disruption into otherwise flat calculated systems. Elemental materials, such as pine needles, hold time and energy within them, like the tree. As the woven layers interact, openings, shadows, and dimensional shifts emerge across the surface that exchange energy and memory, such as the tree.
Rosalena intentionally collapses the distance between weaving and mapping: the woven surface becomes both image and object, both representation and terrain. Her interdisciplinary practice moves fluidly between basketry, digital technology, natural dye processes, and handweaving to consider how land is understood, recorded, and transformed. In layer by layer, material itself becomes a way of rethinking the landscape—not as something fixed or extractable, but as a layered complex ecological system, living in continual change.
Sarah Rosalena (b.1982, Wixárika) is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist and weaver working between craft and technology. Throughout her career, she has built a reputation for breaking boundaries through hybrid textiles, ceramics, and basketry rooted in Indigenous cosmologies, made using both her hands and digital tools. She handweaves from her digital jacquard loom to her mother’s bead loom, mixing hand-dyed natural colors and materials, including cochineal and pine needles, with a synthetic, pixelated palette to create borderless textiles marked by her signature fray. She uses a 3D ceramic printer to generate woven clay forms that she later manipulates, distorts, and reweaves by hand. Working with software, she handcrafts beadwork–pixel per bead–whose surface mimics and disrupts the computer screen.
Renowned for her groundbreaking work in digital jacquard weaving and 3D-printed ceramics, she continues to expand the possibilities of computational craft. She employs advancing technologies to collapse boundaries between high and low tech, human and nonhuman, ancient and futuristic, tradition and progress—unsettling power structures shaped by colonialism. She is Associate Professor of Computational Craft and Haptic Media in the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara. Her work has been recognized with major awards such as the United States Artists Award (2025), the Artadia Award (2023), the Creative Capital Award (2022), the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant (2019), and the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology (2018). She has had solo museum exhibitions with LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and six exhibitions in the recent Getty Pacific Standard Time. She has multiple works in permanent collections at LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.