Sometime around 2011, a Michigan engineer who spent his days crash-testing cars watched his daughters stretch coloured rubber bands over their fingers to make bracelets. He tried to join in, but his hands were far too big. His solution was a scrap of wood studded with pegs, and that pegboard became the Rainbow Loom, which within a few summers had taken over playgrounds and living rooms on both sides of the Atlantic.
Cheong Choon Ng’s invention is more textile than it first appears. Looms have served the clothing trade since at least the fifteenth century, and his pegs follow the same logic of holding loops in place while you work them. Bands are hooked over one another so that each loop is gripped by the next, much as in knitting and crochet, where loops hold loops. Children swapped fishtail and dragon scale designs like friendship bracelets, and several schools banned them outright.
Borderlines, 2024-25, loom bands, wool, and felt framed.
Los Angeles artist Hannah Buechler looked at the same bands and saw paint. Trained in fibers at the Savannah College of Art and Design, with a minor in painting, and later a textile designer at Libertine and a textile librarian at Carnegie Fabrics, she now threads coloured bands onto hundreds of wool strips, each one a ready-made brushstroke. The strips are mounted onto a felt base by needle felting, where a furrowed needle punched through the layers locks the fibres together...
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Image Credits:
Lead: Hannah Buechler, Fountains (detail), 2025, Rubber loom bands, wool.
All images courtesy of the artist and as credited in captions.