Kayla Mattes: Rebooting Textile Art for the Digital Age

Kayla Mattes transforms the visual language of the internet into vibrant handwoven tapestries where pixels, memes and material craft collide in richly textured form

Los Angeles-based artist Kayla Mattes works at the intersection of traditional textile craft and contemporary digital culture, translating the visual language of the internet into tactile, materially rich tapestries. Her practice reimagines the fast, fragmented nature of screen-based communication through the slow, deliberate process of hand weaving.

Currently on view in Reboot > Reweave > Repeat at the California Center for the Arts Museum (extended to 12 April 2026), her work offers a timely reflection on how digital life is experienced, processed and remembered. Spanning works from the past seven years, the exhibition highlights the continuity and evolution of her practice across multiple bodies of work.

From Screen to Surface

Mattes is best known for her handwoven tapestries, which draw on the aesthetics of digital life. Pixelated graphics, browser windows, pop-ups and emoji-like symbols appear throughout her work, forming dense, layered compositions that mirror the structure of online experience.

With each woven thread, fleeting moments from screen culture are slowed down and materialised. Familiar memes, symbols and fragments of text become fixed within the surface, transforming ephemeral content into something enduring and tangible.

Tapestry has historically been used to document the present moment and communicate social and political narratives through labour-intensive processes.

Mattes builds on this legacy, using weaving as both a method of making and a means of processing the visual overload of contemporary life.

Her work highlights the tension between speed and slowness, permanence and ephemerality—offering a materially grounded response to the pace of digital consumption.

Analogue Making, Digital Thinking

Working on manual floor looms (tools largely unchanged since the medieval era) Mattes embraces an analogue process that is conceptually tied to digital systems.

Weaving itself played a key role in the development of early computing, a connection reflected in the grid-like structure of her work.

The natural pixelation of tapestry lends itself to pictorial imagery, reinforcing the relationship between textile and screen. At the same time, the physicality of the medium encourages a slower mode of looking, inviting viewers to engage more deeply with the surface.

Vivid in colour and rhythmic in structure, the tapestries invite close viewing, revealing intricate details that echo the density and repetition of digital interfaces.

In doing so, Mattes bridges the gap between screen and surface, transforming fleeting interactions into objects of permanence.

Reworking the Visual Noise of the Internet

Reboot > Reweave > Repeat positions weaving not only as a method of making, but as a means of processing and reinterpreting the visual overload of the internet age—offering a considered, materially rich response to the pace and texture of digital life.

Together, Mattes’s tapestries bridge the gap between screen and surface, transforming the language of the internet into objects that demand time, attention and reflection.

Visit the exhibition before the 12th April at the California Center for the Arts Museum to experience Mattes’s work up close and uncover the detail, texture and complexity within each piece.

Words by Libbi Kettle