Sarah Rosalena: Unending Spiral

BLUM is pleased to present Unending Spiral, Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Rosalena’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This presentation coincides with the unveiling of Rosalena’s major public artwork commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this June, and the artist’s participation in exhibitions at the Dallas Contemporary and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. She was recently featured in six exhibitions for the Getty’s PST ART: Art x Science Collide. 
Operating at the intersection of traditional craft and advancing technology, Rosalena’s work combines Wixárika weaving techniques, taught to her by her mother and grandmother, with technical processes such as ceramic 3D printing and digital weaving. Similar to computational language, weaving consists of a series of dualities—warp and weft, over and under—which behave similarly to the 0 and 1 binary of code. By giving form to this shared logic in her woven textiles and baskets, it is possible for Rosalena to physicalize and interrogate the technological scaffolding underneath.

Unending Spiral examines the structural and conceptual implications of the spiral as both a formal strategy and a conceptual framework, drawing parallels between galactic formations and terrestrial craft traditions in textiles, coiled ceramics, and basketry. By employing materials of the earth—hand-dyed pine needles, clay, and fiber—Rosalena grounds her work in tactile, site-responsive processes while simultaneously engaging digital technologies with her hand. The pine needles are naturally dyed in plants such as cochineal, walnut, and onion skin, producing a living palette. These material disruptions interrogate the hierarchies that have historically positioned Indigenous craft in opposition to digital methodologies, proposing instead a continuum in which traditional knowledge and emerging technologies co-generate one another, revealing the spiral as a structure of persistence, recursion, and self-perpetuation.

Using digital images of spirals in nature, such as spiral arms of galaxies—Rosalena translates these celestial bodies into handwoven patterns and coiled forms. Her 3D-printed ceramic vessels simulate the process of traditional coil building, yet they resist containment; partway through, the ceramic coils give way to handwoven pine needle basketry, a material intervention that disrupts technological precision with the irregularities of the organic. By positioning the spiral as a recursive, non-linear structure, Unending Spiral challenges dominant narratives of progress, which privilege forward motion and technological advancement over cyclical, regenerative knowledge systems, foregrounding craft as a site of critical resistance and epistemological expansion. Through these hybrid forms, Rosalena posits an alternative material cosmology—one that is iterative, interwoven, and perpetually in infinite motion.