ChainMail!

Chain Mail! Accrues and links the things worth passing on. Prompting visitors to fill out panels and hang them, a once-barren wall gains both style and substance through passersby’s contributions. The wall operates somewhere between billboard and record, a communal log built up by the community. Chain Mail! remains in flux, vacillating between responses to questions of habit, form, and tension.

In habit, preconceived notions of familiarities and difference enact hardened, albeit invisible, edges between groups of people; this project seeks to soften those edges, forming shelter out of communal impressions and creating space for meeting between those edges. In form, porosity is replaced with certainty; this project uses individual acts to bound communal space, affirming its presence as more people engage with it. In tension, interaction is carried through the written word, asking communities to lean on each other to carry each other’s stories from one end to another, from one person to another; this project provides space for mediated conversation, visible but not audible.

Originally built for Seattle Design Festival 2026: In[Flux], the choreography embraces its going up and its coming down; the project was most effective when built up through community contributions and then slowly broken down by the close of the event. As each panel that was installed, it carried a message from one member of the Seattle community to countless others; the ideal way to recycle was to let the community take home the messages that resonated with them, spreading and sharing stories beyond the days of the event.