Woven Dialogues:

A conversation with the artists of “Knit Narratives” Exhibition

Reese Ford, Hana Ichikawa, and Stella Moore explore the act of painting as both a tactile and conceptual form of weaving in Knit Narrative, an exhibition on display at Riverside’s North Gallery. These three artists applied to RAC’s 2025 Call for Exhibitions and stood out as a powerful trio. Their proposal was selected and now Knit Narrative is on view in Riverside’s North Gallery. This past April, we spoke with Ford and Ichikawa about the show.

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RAC: Hello! Please introduce yourself!

R: My name is Reese Ford, and I am an oil painting student at the University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art & Design. While I have loved the visual arts for many years, an additional part of my life is singing — specifically classical choral music. I’ve been involved in choir since the age of 10, including now, where I’m a member of the Music School’s Chamber Choir.

H: I am a graduating senior at the University of Michigan studying Art & Design. I mainly work with oils as my medium. I was born and raised in Michigan. Both my parents immigrated from Japan back in 1998, which is central to my conceptual exploration of my Asian American identity. 

RAC: When reviewing submissions for this year’s Call for Exhibitions, our program committee was struck not only by the quality of your individual practices, but by Knit Narrative‘s point of view as a whole – its exploration of the personal and interpersonal, and the way the show builds a collective whole out of individualized, actualized forms. Can you speak to this idea of knitting and weaving as both a material and a conceptual thread, and how it connects across all three bodies of work? 

H: We come from different backgrounds but landed in the same school. We each have a story to tell from our lives, but I don’t see it as a simple autobiography. For me, I used to think painting was a private practice, a process that is not visible to the public eye, and that mindset has quickly taken an isolating toll on me as someone who was seeking Asian American solidarity while trying to figure myself out as a person. After meeting other outstanding painters like Reese and Stella, it felt like painting was a silently shared and appreciated act of archiving the human experience.  This show is an homage to painting and its versatility as a medium. There is a conceptual stream to our works that interconnects with each other, and you can tell that visually with how we paint figures. We’re like a woven structure of leftover scrap yarns, and I think that’s beautiful.

R: There’s a unique physical and emotional tactility in this show because of the way it combines complex oil paintings with textile art. In regular viewing settings, there’s always an assumed distance between art and audience, but in this case, the textile aspect of Stella’s piece invites a more intimate experience. While not all of our works are interactive in this way, we take this idea of increasing intimacy in other forms of presentation: paintings of smaller scale that you must be close to witness, imagery of family lineages, and evidence of personal reflections upon our bodies, gender expression, and culture. 

RAC: Was there a collaborative process between the three of you in developing this show? That might look like a shared conceptual approach or a more hands-on, direct collaboration on a particular work.

R: This show has existed long before we gave it a name or a place to manifest itself in. I first met Hana and Stella in our freshman year of college, where we were in the same 3-D foundational course taught by Stamps lecturer Nate Byrne. We were at the very beginning of our academic journeys, and while we didn’t paint in that particular class, our friendship has lasted over the years and bolstered each other’s creative practices. 

We ebbed and flowed against our vast degree requirements but always held steadfast in our individual loves for painting the figure. This shared conceptual approach was what instilled in us the desire for a three-person group show, and we couldn’t be more excited.

H:  I remember scheduling a day in the summer to sit down over zoom and thread everything together with our existing work. We were all in different parts of the world. I think Stella was studying abroad in Italy, I just came back from Colorado from the Anderson Ranch Arts Program, and Reese was back home in San Francisco Bay Area after being an assistant in New York for Julie Heffernan.  We talked a lot about women in creative fields, labor, craft, etc. Depictions of feminized bodies were a pattern we saw in our works, and we wanted to emphasize that connection to gender politics.

Stella and Reese have some pieces in the show that feature textile work. I like to view them as the thread that connects our pieces together into one big painting exhibit or a “quilt.”

RAC: Which work in the show would you point to as a good entry point for first-time viewers (a piece that opens a door into the exhibition as a whole)? And do you have any words that might help audiences find their own meaning in the work? 

H:  I recommend starting with Reese’s Maternal Line and ending with Stella’s Cornfield (Navel Gazing)! They uncover the layers of femmehood, exploration of the body as a rectilinear painting structure and as a literal visual symbol, tradition, culture, and social inquiry. It goes from a narrative that is personal to the artist to broad and theoretical, both of which possess the potential to resonate with our audiences on different levels.

R: Last year, Hana and I took a course titled “Sequential Images in Painting” with our beloved professor Jim Cogswell. Our projects from that course are exhibited here — mine, “Maternal Line,” and theirs, “Gishiki.” This synthesis allowed us to consider what “narrative” really means and how it can be communicated, distorted, and built. While we both display different narratives in these works, they speak to the phrase “Knit Narrative” and how storytelling is at the heart of what all artists aim to accomplish.

RAC:  Is there a work in this exhibit that has any particular personal significance that you would like to share? 

H: I am a little disappointed that I was not able to include some of my pieces from my final senior thesis project because of overlapping exhibition schedules; however, a piece I would say that closely reflects my current research is Unravel. Using visual fragmentation and collaging different photos, I attempt to capture the imperceptible emotional processings of Western and Asian imperialism through my personal encounters with receiving racism and seeking solidarity with other Asian peers. Through the lens of self-orientalism, I trace the desire to rekindle connections with culture while confronting the cognitive dissonance of the American dream, critiquing the commodification of Japanese traditions, and challenging Western socio-political standards. Japan is both a victim of Western imperialism and a perpetrator of imperialism. I explore my personal experiences in this painting, the primary concern being double consciousness and critical thinking around racial-ethnic history.

RAC: Is there anything else you want readers to know about Knit Narrative?!I 

H: Thank you to Riverside Arts Center for hosting us and I hope we can share the beautiful, reincarnating process of expressing joy and grief through painting from this show! 

Knit Narrative exhibits through June 7th in the North Gallery at Riverside Arts Center.