Weaving connections, from Costa Rica to Antarctica
Artist and performer Thea Rae on hanging from trees, doing stunts, coding, performing in the circus, making sculptures, doing science, and rethinking waste
This is an edited transcript of our conversation. You can read a condensed version here.
Q: You have an exhibition on — it just opened, right?
A: Yeah, I’m part of the Fiberworks Collective — a group interested in the intersection of technology and fibers. So, soft circuitry and e-textiles. And they did an open call for work at that intersection. Since I do weaving with satin thread and LED fibers, my work crosses over into that Venn diagram. It’s soft circuitry, but also sculptural at the same time.
I’m showing a small wall-hung piece. I also have a show that just closed in Long Island. I’ve been showing this work around New York, and I had a show in Miami last December.
This is part of a whole body of work — your website says “The choices we make, the people we encounter, the places we live direct our path in life. This body of work is about how we traverse life. I see my life as a web of people and places I love(d), opportunities and choices I’ve made.” Where did that come from? Tell me about it.
I’ve lived a very non-traditional life, all over the world, and now I have a really disparate network. And I’ve also worked in a lot of different industries. So things can feel a little detached. But I’ve met so many different people, and we’re all intertwined — connected in ways you wouldn’t expect.
A few years ago, someone who was very close to me passed away. And it was really interesting to see my world, my networks shift, after that. That got me thinking about why I like webs, and what webs mean to me — I’ve been making large-scale installation webs, for people to play on, for about 15 years. What happens when you take a node out?
We have social networks, but I’m more interested in corporeal networks — keeping those connections I have with people in Bangkok, for example, or Antarctica, regardless of where I am. And help them connect to other people in niche communities. Someone will be like, “I wanna do this 3D printing project, but in China. Do you know anyone?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I know these three people who specialize in that — let me connect you to them.” It’s a way of interweaving our society through mutual interests.
But when you lose someone who’s a major hub for you, your community shifts around and your web moves. And sometimes you don’t really think about these points that become major nodes, until they’re gone. It’s not that your world collapses, it just moves.
So I’m really interested in that. I’m going to do some generative modelling around that, because I want to make these into kinetic webs. But I haven’t quite got there.
I think a lot about how webs become an allegory for community, and oftentimes we don’t really realize who we’re really pulling on, in different directions. What happens in communities where we don’t put such tension on one person, but the community actually supports? It’s a way of thinking about life, for me. And it’s manifested in this visual representation.
This idea of tension is a structural thing — it’s a kind of support in your work. When you say “generative” do you mean on-screen or physical?
All of the wood in my projects is from 3D modelled sculptures that were laser cut — they’re all offcuts from other projects. So I like the conversation between digital technologies and how we use them as a means of influencing a more traditional practice, and working back and forth. I don’t like just working on the screen, or just working physically. I really like using tools in conversation with my work. It’s not, “I’m gonna make a generative work and project it,” it’s “I’m gonna make this and use it as a source of ideation for what’s possible in the physical world”.
Is it important to you to recycle materials for environmental reasons, or is it more conceptual?
It’s both. Making art can generally be a wasteful process. Especially with digital technologies — we think about how efficient it is when you laser cut, for example — you get very precise forms. It enables us to make things we couldn’t make in the past. But it produces a lot of waste.
That’s why additive [manufacturing] is arguably a better process. But by using the offcuts of my subtractive process, I found a way to make it much less wasteful, and really inspiring for other work.
In the same way that cars would be more sustainable if we could just fix them, old technology can’t really be sustainable unless we change the way we think about it. New technology could be more sustainable, if we think about what is waste and what is useful. A lot of the time what most people think of as trash, I think, “This could be a very interesting material, if we rethink it.”
This is something that AI and ideation tools are really helpful for. How to use millions of bottle caps, for example. It becomes an extra way to bounce off ideas.
The wood in the sculptures — to me it doesn’t look laser cut at all. You’re sanding it, staining it, doing something to it. Tell me about the process of going from offcut to sculpture.
On my Instagram there are some process videos. It’s all walnut — a hardwood. So I’m not staining it at all. I’m just taking off the char — when you lasercut you can get some charring. Some plywoods and lighter woods, you don’t get it as much because they don’t have a lot of resin. But walnut is a pretty high-resin wood. It depends how young the boards are too.
So I do a pass of sanding to take off the charring, then to round the edges. I play a little with the perception of what it is. These forms are all super interesting, just because they’re lasercutting offcuts. I would never have thought of making any of these shapes intentionally. They’re the byproduct of something I designed. I used Rhino to make ten different forms, then I 3D printed models for all of them, then lasercut when I eventually decided to make those sculptures.
And then I just saved all of these pieces, because they were so interesting, and because it felt so wasteful. Running shops over the years, I’ve seen people just immediately throw out the waste. And I’m like, “There’s something interesting there.”
There’s a kind of magic when you’re organising a board to maximize the amount of cuts you can get out of it for your work. You end up placing things really tightly together. But not too close, because you can risk burning the wood. That’s where you get all of these really interesting tapers that you see in my work. So it’s an interesting conversation between the process and output in my current body of work.
Okay. Seeing these wood pieces, I thought, “How did you possibly cut that?” Now it makes perfect sense. So as a hardwood, you can apply a little tension to it.
Sometimes they do break. I will pin and glue them if I really like them — I like to persist. Otherwise I let it be an organic aspect of the process, where, “This is a really interesting shape, let’s see how it’s gonna come together”.
Presently I’m working on a really large curve. I’m curious whether it will work out the way I want. Sometimes I’ll attach different pieces, because the edges of boards makes a useful plane to glue them together, to continue a curve. So I’ve been working on building more shapes out of the shapes I have. And if you change the grain of the wood, sometimes you get a little more strength. Sometimes, it’s more vulnerable. That’s what I mean that it’s a conversation between digital and more traditional fabrication — it’s more about how things will come together successfully than my original intentions.
Yeah, what I like about it is that it’s not just playing with materials and forms, but there’s some content there, there’s a concept — networks, tension, things like that. Where do you get the walnut?
Right now, it’s all still offcuts from years ago. My ITP thesis was about emotive robotics — abstract forms with simple motion, and a sense of feeling, in a gestural way. Those pieces had a lot of motion. I was deeply inspired by sea anemones at the time — they felt surreal in how they move. And because I do a lot of movement work in another aspect of my creative practice, I wanted to make simple robots — not humanoid ones, but how mechanical motion can convey a sense of feeling.
So I spent three or four years digging into that, making all these forms. I came to really like working with walnut aesthetically — specifically, the combination of walnut and brass. It has a sculptural, highly-designed quality that made it beautiful to look at. And when people look at the forms, they’re like, “Why is it doing that?” I wanted people to take away a sense of emotion.
I was also working a lot with fiber optics, as one of the means of gesticulation. Which is how I ended up finding the LED fibers that I’m presently using. I wanted something very soft and flexible.
I made a complete about-face from that project, but all of the offcuts from it are what I’ve been working with, for the last two-and-a-half years.
These are the ones I saw on your Instagram with a wooden base and these loopy things, moving.
Yeah. It’s the fiber optics that move. That series produced a lot of the forms I’m working with.
So, what you’re working with now are LED fibers — not electroluminescent wire.
[Holds some up] I won’t be able to show this too well over the camera, but on one side are these two power buses, and then there are connections between them. It’s running in parallel. They’re 1.2 meters, which is the maximum length because they run on about 22 Volts. The thin, flexible PCB wouldn’t be able to handle much more voltage running through it.
I think they’re fascinating, because they’re just noodly. Most PCBs can’t handle a lot of tension — like the one in your phone that connects your screen to your battery. These, on the other hand, are flexible, coated with silicone on either side, and they have the tiniest surface-mount LEDs on either side. I’ve taken them apart to see, “What would happen if I did this, or that with it?” But once you take the silicone off, the LEDs are so small, they’ll just pop right off.
If you think about it, we have LEDs in screens that are super small. Someone realized at some point that they could put them in a line on a flexible PCB. It’s a 2mm thick line. Just thinking about how we are at this place technologically — especially as I started working with LEDs in 2006, when the smallest you were looking at was a 3mm LED with two prongs coming out.
These, at present, are not programmable or addressable; they function as a single pixel. But I imagine it’s not too far off. Then you could have Edison bulbs that are programmable. Phillips will probably roll out a bulb with a little spiral in it that changes colors in interesting ways.
There are already 3mm addressable RGB LED strips. The spacing between LEDs is a bit longer than I’d like. It’s interesting to see how far we’ve come, and to think where we’ll be in five years. And because it’s flexible, there are some really interesting elements of persistence of vision, if you have addressable LEDs — things moving, and what that might mean, technically speaking.
So I think there’s so much that’s going to become available from this little tiny, niche medium.
Groundwork
Let’s go back a little bit to ITP. What other things did you do there? Where did you get the inspiration to go in this direction?
I was already working on kinetic pieces and LEDs for over a decade before I started at ITP. My undergrad thesis was all recycled plastics and UV LEDs that were degrading the plastics over time. Interactive installations and sculptures.
So when I went to grad school, I was more interested in how to use digital processes to enhance the work I was doing. In the year leading up to ITP, I became obsessed with sea anemones. During my first semester, I took a class on automata and kinetic motion, so I started looking at biomimicry — that’s at the core of what automata are.
That led me down the path of trying to evoke different emotions through kinetic movement. I’ve always been interested in how people communicate and connect, and what gets perceived.
I also took one of the performance classes, looking at how to use digital technologies in live performance. At the time, I was putting VR headsets on people. I recorded a VR experience, and I made people experience it while standing on stage. There’s something I still find fascinating about watching someone experience VR — it’s like a way of translating the digital world back to the physical one, like a game of Telephone. If you have no clue what they’re experiencing, you’re just trying to infer what’s happening, based on the way they’re going like this around the space.
So that got me interested in bigger gestures, and what they convey. And then how that links to the Uncanny Valley. That was the question in my thesis. I thought about different humans and how they move, and how you can tell someone apart from someone else by their gait. I started recording people walking, how their muscles tighten and relax, what’s being conveyed.
And I did a bunch of reading on how all this relates to communication. So much of our communication is nonverbal. Even how modifying your speech changes what you communicate. I became deeply entrenched in speech habits, did multiple interviews with speech therapists.
And I found out that a big part of what feels human to us is the imperfections. The way we don’t move perfectly. The muscle tension we keep because of an injury, for example. That really makes us feel real. There’s so much in the Japanese concept of Wabi Sabi that’s relevant for digital design.
So in general, at ITP I looked at a lot of disparate things, and found my own way of bringing them together.
Do you remember some of the things that you read for your thesis and in general at ITP — some things that influenced you?
A lot of different stuff from cognitive scientists and speech therapists and behavioral therapists. All of these different perspectives on human communication, because a lot of our understanding of it seems to get furthered by people who have challenges communicating. At least that’s where I found the best research on it.
Google had a lab specifically for emotive robotics. A good friend of mine works for a company making humanoid robots powered by AI. They’re very compelling, and it’s really interesting to see what’s happening presently in that space.
I still think that most humanoid robotics coming out are off-putting — distinctly inhuman. Because to make something that feels human, you have to plan in obsolescence. And billion-dollar robotics doesn’t want that of course. It depends on where in the world, and what we want them to do.
I was working with an assistive lab — for differently abled bodies. I think there is a lot that’s interesting in how we accommodate someone who, for example, doesn’t have ten digits on their hands. And technologies to support non-standard practices — what those augmentations look like, and how they might actually enhance someone beyond the standard human abilities. And how we perceive what’s human or inhuman about that is really fascinating.
For example, my dad used bluetooth hearing aids for decades. At some point, we were in a really loud space and I was like, “I really need to leave”. And he’s like, “I’m not bothered — I just turned the volume down on my hearing aids.” There is something magical about that.
There’s a woman who wears different pairs of legs — she’s done a TED talk about this. If she wants to be taller, instead of wearing a pair of heels she can just make her legs longer.
So I wanted to understand a human-centric perspective, even though I didn’t want to make human-centred art. Besides the fact that I am human, and I do physical movement research.
Right, this relates to your work in performance. You did work in circus arts.
Yeah, during my undergraduate. I had been a clown in my high school years — not a clown in the circus, but a balloon-twisting, magic-tricking, slapsticking clown for birthday parties. My mom opened a balloon business, and one day she realized I could twist balloons, because I watched a 30-minute video on how to do it. And she’s like, “How about a weekend job?” You don’t have that much choice as a child. It was an interesting experience nonetheless.
Then in college, a friend convinced me to take circus classes. Little did I know — there was an alternate-universe self who said “No” to taking those classes and didn’t want anything to do with circus.
But it pivoted my life off into this journey, where I have now spent many years pursuing stupid human tricks, for communicative appeal. I still do circus to this day, and I also work for film and television.
I train four to six hours a day, in addition to my studio practice. So my days are very full with my creative endeavours — when I’m not in Antarctica or on set, or coding for some client.
At the moment I’m working on a not-really-theater show, with five different performers weaving a web and performing on it. Hopefully going into previews this summer. Projects like that tend to take more time and resources.
It sounds like a way to bring together — weave together — the different strands of your practice. Some of the works on your website look like they’re between performance and sculpture, in trees.
Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of research for work in outdoor environments. I think there’s something about humans connecting with nature. That becomes more complicated, because trees, in order to be loaded in that kind of direction and pull, you need an arborist to check a myriad of things, if you’re doing that for a length of time.
Tree roots can handle a fair amount for a short time, but longer than that can lead to problems. So, finding the right place, making sure the soil is the right quality, that the trees are of the right health. You don’t necessarily know a tree is healthy just from the outside. A lot of time you need to do some soil sampling. I learned this working for a company that builds treehouses.
There’s also the fact that trees are part of a network. Does that come into it?
Sort of. I have about a hundred houseplants in my place, and I found that if they don’t have access to shared soil, they can’t communicate properly, because of mycelium and root structures. When we put plants in individual pots, we’re isolating them, like what remote work and isolation does to humans.
So I think a lot about how we network across media — not just humans but everything we build connections with. And trees deeply impact humans’ emotional regulation — when people are surrounded by greenery, they tend to have lower stress levels. But for plants too — how can we ensure that they have a good network? In my own home at least, I tend to plant things in larger boxes, with more diversity of plants. Or at least in a place where there are other plants. My whole house operates on grow lights, also.
Let’s talk about the stunt work for film and TV. How did that come about?
I was in grad school, and I moved to New York with the intention of leaving circus and movement behind — to open a new chapter about technology, digital design, visual art practice. I thought, “I’ll get a job coding, live a more normal life.”
But after about two months of not moving my body in silly ways, I realized I had become addicted to that — it was important to regulating my happiness and wellbeing. So I found a space to start training regularly.
Because I was in grad school, I trained during the day. And that just happened to be at the same time as a large stunt community. I trained next to them for two years, and someone finally said, “Why don’t you do stunts? You train as much as any of us.” I thought I was too old — in my 30s. They said that’s silly.
Madonna was a lot older, and I saw that you’ve worked with her.
That’s right. So I started doing it, and it deeply impacted my movement practice. I had never trained to make something look gruesome, or ugly. My work had always been “pretty” and balletic. I spent a couple years doing mixed martial arts and Brazilian jujitsu, boxing, Tae Kwon Do — all these different practices. How to look elegant and effortless, like you would never fall.
And stunt work totally upended that. We like to think of stunts as these big things. But a lot of it is just hitting the ground really hard. You throw yourself aggressively at the ground. When you fall in real life, you try to fall as slowly as possible, because of course you don’t want to hurt yourself. But to look like you’re falling, you have to commit to throwing yourself to the ground. You’re actually jumping at the ground.
Of course you’re doing that in specific ways, and with lots of practice. So I spent years just trying to be able to just do that. There were a lot of breakdancers at this gym also. Just seeing a lot of different ways of moving shifted my practice.
The performance piece I’m working on evolved out of that. Here in New York you have stunt performers, you have breakdancers, you have ballerinas, you have circus performers. Because it’s such a Mecca for performance. And they all have distinctly different backgrounds and styles and voices as creators.
To me that represents what the US used to embody. On a local level, New York City still does that, and that diversity is what makes America such an interesting country.
So the performance is about that — five very diverse bodies and backgrounds. It’s called Weaving their Webs. You might not necessarily want to cross paths with someone all the time, but you do anyway, and not always in a way that works. But it’s still intertwined. So it’ll be about how different relationships form, how different perspectives interface with one another. In an abstracted but also on-the-nose way — it depends how you think about it. How you might be supported by people whose values you might not share or agree with.
Of course it’s not just in the US but on a global level. And this is why I think that nationalism is actually a detriment to humans everywhere.
It says on your website that you were raised in the Seneca nation. Is that right?
Yeah. When I was a kid, my mom was deeply a part of Indigenous culture. And she took me to Mexico and New Mexico for different ceremonies. She split with my dad, we moved to the Seneca reservation for a few years — she was supporting the head of the reservation at the time. We are actually a small percentage Blackfoot, not Seneca.
That was also deeply impactful on the way I make art and see the world, because it’s the first framework I was given for how to share culture, and values. You know how a lot of people, when they’re young, go to church? My early memories of how to build connection and community came from Native ceremonies and traditions. I think it shows up in the way I think about resource management, the preservation of history, the way we value elders in society, soft skills.
And performance too. When you look at how deeply I value the communicative aspects of performance, and as a form of cultural preservation. Performance always was, and always will be, that. But people don’t think about that. It’s a time capsule for what the performers were feeling and expressing in that moment.
You’ve travelled a lot, interacted with different groups of people.
Yeah, I’ve been privileged enough to work in the jungles of Costa Rica, alongside teams of local people (my Spanish is minimal!). I worked in Portugal for a year, I worked in Thailand. Being exposed to so many different ways of being in the world, value systems.
I don’t think cancel culture is really a good thing, but I do believe in holding people accountable, and giving them space to apologize. Different cultures handle that in different ways. Smaller communities — like Indigenous lands — hold their peers to different forms of accountability.
So you’re working on this performance. And you’ve got a couple of exhibitions on. And then you’re about to leave for Antarctica!
Yeah. I’ll be on the ship for 63 days. There’s a ten-day port call in New Zealand, and at the end of the expedition there’s a six-day port call. I work for the United States Antarctic Program. I’m support staff for the NSF-funded research that goes on. I do electronics on the ship, to support different experiments.
It sounds really fancy — mostly it’s plugging and unplugging really sensitive sensors. And dealing with the technical operation of experiments, making sure all the calibrations stay correct. If I have to get out the soldering iron, something probably went wrong.
Last year we did hack apart a few things because someone decided to put a router made for indoor use in an area of the boat that gets exposed to water. It’s a research vessel on the ocean, and there’s not only a lot of water but a lot of salt. Salt and electronics are not really friends.
So it’s not any kind of artist residency.
No. I do work on art while I’m there. I like sketching icebergs — I call that my budget postcards. Fast sketches of icebergs as we cruise by them.
This time I’m also gonna bring some of my wood and LEDs to do an Antarctica series. Because it’s a really unique and beautiful experience.
There is a residency there that I would love to do someday. But no, it’s a job. One of the things we’re going to be looking at on this cruise is how much methane might be released into the atmosphere from a glacier as it recedes. Terrifying but necessary science.
What an amazing life you have. And the work is great — you’ve sold some sculptures. Are you able to support yourself as an artist?
Yeah, I’ve sold quite a few. I’m working on a couple of commissions right now. Selling this body of work will help support the other creative endeavours. But who knows what the next year will bring.
I do stunts, I rig, I work in Antarctica, I code for some clients doing web apps and such, I’ll do fabrication here and there for other artists. Sometimes selling my art adds to the support, but I make art because I have to — it’s a compulsion.
I’m really blessed with a good life in New York — I have an in-home studio. But I am considering other places. Originally I was thinking out of the country, but given what’s happening here, I think it’s really important for people with affluence, and influence, to stay in the country right now.
I will write all this up and send you something to look at, but I’m not sure I can get it to you before you leave.
I will have internet access — I get 3GB a day. And access to a satellite phone if you need to talk. I just don’t know about time zones — we’ll be moving through them. I will work 12-hour shifts of some determination.
