QUALEASHA for Glamcult #142, the Anima issue

Meet QUALEASHA WOOD, the New Jersey-born, Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary artist reimagining textiles under a digital gaze. Her jacquard-woven tapestries are a layered and tumultuous confrontation of selfhood within our socio-political reality, which fetishises Black Femme representation while pushing it to the margins. Qualeasha’s practice interrogates all corners of the internet — from chronically online pop culture codes to digital surveillance issues and cyberharassment. Connecting that to broader references to Catholicism, social philosophy, and political power structures, Qualeasha shares the personal to expose the global with unflinching vulnerability and outspokenness. It is the same demeanor with which she nearly refused to exhibit her work at The Met (she now remains one of the youngest artists ever to enter the museum’s permanent collection), and that continues to fuel her unapologetic honesty within and outside her work. Combining cybernetic and analogue methods, Qualeasha materialises a pixel into a stitch, unmasking narratives that we cannot scroll past.

Hey Qualeasha! Lovely to be in touch. I’d love to begin by exploring your relationship to textiles. What connects you to textiles as a medium of artistic expression?
Textiles hold deep sentimentality for me — I have grown up valuing textiles very much, especially through women in my family. While they initially learned textile crafts for practical purposes, it became a shared language and a creative tool for them, and eventually for me. I gravitated toward jacquard weaving during my junior year at Rhode Island School of Design after a weekend at my grandmother’s. One night, unable to sleep, I noticed a photo blanket wrapped around me — a gift from my aunt featuring baby pictures of me, my brother, and my cousins.

It’s beautiful how you allow your familial histories to live on through your work.
My mom and I could talk for hours about my textile work. It was a huge thing for me. I was at this institution that didn’t consider the art experience for people who looked like me or came from a small town with no arts culture. But that was the only experience I cared about.

You’ve also really made it your own by contextualising this heritage in the digital nature of today’s reality. When did you get your first computer?
Yeah, the internet has existed for my whole life. I got my first computer when I was five. I credit Maralie Armstrong, an incredible artist and professor, for nurturing me into my full practice. Through her, I discovered that the analytical engine — a.k.a. the first computer — was programmed by Charles Babbage in 1837 based on the punch card system taken from jacquard weaving. This gave us binary code. In the history of computers, women played a primary role. Often being mathematicians or technicians, they were very marginalised — namely, Indigenous women who had the skill to thread cables and wires in tiny spaces. After learning that, I became obsessed and went on to start having my work woven.

It’s absolutely mind-blowing how overlooked the contribution of women to the development of digital technology has been. Speaking of your own practice, I’d love to learn more about your creative process. How does an artwork typically begin?
It’s everything I’ve been consuming colliding and demanding to be purged. I often get stuck on the little things like an error message, a TikTok, a Facebook status from years ago. And I’ll be subconsciously thinking about those things while reading Martin Heidegger or Susan Sontag. Because of all of our smart devices, there’s no separation anymore. Everything is a disruption. It’s practically impossible for me not to compound these things.

Your visual language perfectly illustrates the overwhelming chaos and the constant flood of information we are surrounded by. Can you tell me more about the conceptual flow of thoughts and inspirations that manifest themselves in your pieces?
My favourite recent exemplification of this would be Deus Ex Machina (What Was I Made For?). My references ranged from sixteenth-century paintings, to SZA’s ‘Ghost in the Machine’, Descartes’ dualism theory, Frantz Fanon’s ‘The Fact of Blackness’, and even my unpublished tweets. I thought I had experienced these things separately, but really they were all layered events. At first, I wanted to investigate why I related to the disembodiment in the ‘Ghost in the Machine’ so much. That prompted me to rewatch the movie Ex Machina, followed by Barbie (‘What Was I Made For’ refers to Billie Eilish’s song from Barbie’s soundtrack). I realised that both leads are just women trying to exist beyond their predetermined contexts. Once the women gain autonomy and self-awareness, it becomes a question of purpose.

It’s fascinating how long-standing and practically universal these narratives of womanhood have been — they can be traced back to the dawn of time.
I thought about the hypothetical experience of the first woman in the world; I was taught that Eve was her. I’ve always felt that Eve was a scapegoat for a man’s shortcomings, and humanity at large. In that, I drew the comparison to Black women occupying a similar role within a white supremacist system. What really slid all the puzzle pieces in place was remembering that ‘Ex Machina’ as a title came from Deus Ex Machina (translation: God from the machine) — a Greek literary trope of a divine intervention that saves the hero from an impossible problem.

How does navigating these ideas in your practice influence your perception of your own self?
Describing who I was at any point, it will always come down to the split and scattered versions of myself across the internet. There’s the girl I was on Tumblr, Facebook, Club Penguin, The Sims — the girl I am now on my public Instagram story vs. close friends. I spend a lot of time contending with how I’ve been performing my own identity, discovering it, and shaping it for myself and for strangers, quite literally my whole conscious life. I think anyone with internet access has experienced that, whether they see it that way or not. We must also consider the role of capitalism, and online advertising. In that, what parts of me are there because I really identify with them, and which parts were sold to me?

I imagine that moulding your self-presentation both online and in your art further entangles this dynamic. Does incorporating yourself as a significant element in your work add another layer of complexity or performance?
I used to push back against the word “performance” in my practice. I believe that I’m authentically all of the versions of myself I present — and, as a Scorpio, I fully reject any suggestion that I could be performative. Yet there is a constant stepping into another self, and a level of voyeurism that is undoubtedly influencing my body and my presence. Truthfully, selfies are 100% performative acts. I’ve unintentionally trained myself to get the best lighting and to make my gaze just piercing enough, even if I don’t stage my environment too much.

And how has your relationship to your emotional and physical identity developed throughout your art?
I’m happy to say that I’m in a good place with my identity presently, which is a really nice change. I’ve never fully felt at home in my body, and I’ve been unpacking that. This is also why it’s so easy for me to do things like deepfake myself. There is a level of disassociation, where the body and the self become a tool and site for research. These feelings come from different places, such as afro-pessimism, which reduces Blackness to an “other” of Whiteness, misogyny, racism, and my body dysmorphic disorder. An important part of my practice has been grappling with loss of control and the projections placed upon me. Instead of convincing the world that I am not a derelict object, I weaponise it.

There’s so much internalised (and absolutely unjustified) discomfort women are told to carry, when it’s in fact the viewer who perceives a femme body with fetishisation. It’s moving to see art that topples this shame fostered around our bodies.
Why do I have to feel shame because someone sexualised me without my consent? Shouldn’t they feel shameful? I aim to push the give-and-take relationship between the artist and the viewer through subversion. I give up vulnerable pieces of myself, and in exchange, all I want is to make some people feel a bit less burdened by things beyond their control. And for those who may simply find my work cheeky, I want them to question why something like “young hot ebony” is humorous to them.

I’d love to talk about symbolism in your work — specifically the religious motifs. What is your relationship to religion and how does it seep into your work?
I was raised in a family of Christians and Catholics, but I didn’t really personally engage in organised religion. Still, I grew up believing in God. My work has been criticised as anti-religious simply because it’s critical of it. I specifically questioned the framework of the Five Percent Nation, an Afro-Nationalist religious movement that views the Black man himself to be God. To me, the idea that being created in His image means that you are God’s consciousness is quite beautiful. Yet, even in something as expansive as that, women were never recognised.

I think we underestimate how much influence religious narratives can have — the exclusion of women in them will implicitly prime how we think about women. Especially considering the rapid re-transfiguration of how religion is manifested in our daily lives.
Exactly. My issue with religion is how do we understand and visualise who or what God is? It brought me to think of the new Gods we find in false worship through parasocial relationships online. We “follow” and exalt influencers into power. And while that may be fun if you chose that path, it’s not fun when it’s given to you. At some point, I was dehumanised and reduced to an online resource of all things “woke” at my college campus. I was pedestaled to a saviour or a canceller, simply because I shared my opinions on the world as I experienced it. I soon realised that I didn’t exist as Qualeasha to these people anymore, but something else — so I started to make work about it.

I have also read that being a “woke” persona has caused your online identity to be doxed by a bunch of right-wing [insert a print-inappropriate insult]. How has this journey of reclamation of your identity shaped / been shaped by your practice?
I’ve been doxed more than once. One of those times, it was the result of some friends and I overtaking the Tomi Lahren Facebook group and changing it to a Michelle Obama fan page right after the inauguration of Donald Trump. For two weeks, I received endless racist comments, death and sexual violence threats. As a girl on the internet, people say fucked up things to you all the time. Grooming was such a common experience for anyone with a social media profile around their teen years. I was also stalked by a peer of mine in my freshman year of college. It was terrifying to think people would show up and hurt me, and that they were spreading my semi-nude photos (which I’d created for my art practice) all over the internet. But, in a way, these weren’t new experiences, so that fear quickly translated into anger. While I didn’t act at the time, I eventually translated it into Clout Chasin’ in 2023.

This is such a horrible reality for so many. I’m really sorry that you had to go through this — it truly makes my blood boil. Clout Chasin’ evokes such a strong sense of rage but also inspires courage to stand up to these online abusers. Could you tell me more about its creation?
So the piece includes a small assortment of screenshots of comments from the men who had made threatening comments towards me, keeping their photos and first names. I took the screenshots in 2017 just to have proof that violence and racism still could happen so casually and no one would care. I never planned to use them for art. Until, in 2023, I read a review of a group show I was in, in which a random blogger said that I utilised “pretend screenshots” in a way that felt too cliché. He insinuated that the things I described couldn’t be real, because they weren’t real enough for him. That really set me off.

The audacity!
I have an anti-trauma-porn approach, so I avoid showing things like that in my work. I don’t gain anything from flaunting my trauma directly to an audience for consumption. But just that once, I felt it was important to slightly lift the veil. To show how these men are real people just as I am, with family and friends. I secretly wanted that initial fear to get to the viewer, for them to question if their neighbour or friend or relative could be capable of something like that.

This ugliness is so much closer to us than we might think. The internet makes it visible and fosters it even further.
I find it interesting how humans as social beings have been absolutely corrupted by it — we laugh at Boomers and Gen X-ers for their disdain of the Internet, but I do think there’s a lot of validity to it. There’s so much potential for greatness and for harm online, and we just never know which end of the spectrum we’ll get whenever we go on the web.

It can be such a love-hate relationship. More broadly, how do you feel about the unprecedented rise of technology?
Despite this, I actually really love technology, and am constantly working on private projects with VR, AI, and coding that ultimately trickle back into my practice. I’m also a sci-fi nerd, so I’m a little too excited about the possibility of cybernetic modifications, or a future where AI is self-aware. A few months ago, I cloned my voice and have been training an AI model to think like me through diary entries.

That’s fun! I do think it’s so important to work with technology, not against it. Coming back to textiles, how has it been to (re)introduce the medium to the art world? It’s been such an underappreciated and dismissed craft due to its colonial connotations, but it feels like it’s starting to finally get some recognition it deserves.
It’s really exciting to see women and artists of colour starting to dominate fine arts spaces with textiles. For me, bringing a familial craft into that space was about challenging what we consider Art with a capital A. I’ve never fully identified with being a “textile artist” — my approach is more about what else a textile can be. Still, I feel like we’re making “craft” less of a dirty word. It’s undergoing a rebirth, sort of like painting has for the last century. However, inclusion always means exclusion, thus we’re starting to see what’s considered good and what’s considered bad. I really hate the labelling the art world prescribes in order to uphold its own validity, but that’s the inevitable reality until the next big revolution of the medium.

I’d love to talk about the The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex — the piece you didn’t want to give to the MET. What were your reservations? [The MET hasn’t given us permission to use an image of the work].
Oh, there were so many. You’re approached with promises of exposure, but oftentimes you end up boosting an institution’s profile more than they boost yours. Also (while that wasn’t my experience with The Met thankfully) at the time, Black Art was on a meteoric uptick because of police brutality and murders of innocent Black people. So a lot of interest in Black Art was about apologising for racism through the platforming of Black Figuration. It wasn’t sustainable, and a lot of people had short-lived careers because of that. I had to question, was my work good or just timely? I also didn’t feel ready for such a big step, from an artwork I never intended to gain so much attention. I got pigeon-holed really quickly as well — for at least a year after that exhibition, everyone asked me for work that “looked like” that piece.

Still, that is an incredible milestone. And I’m not only talking about The Met or the countless formal awards, but the empowerment and vulnerability your work represents. How does it feel to be where you are now?
I know I’m absolutely crushing it, but I am also my biggest critic. I really never expected to be here. When I was in pre-school, I had written that my dream job was to be a bank robber and an FBI agent. Then I thought I’d go into the military like my parents did. So, to now be a full-time artist is a big privilege that I can lose at any moment. And I sure have done a lot, but I’m far away from the end, too.