Every year the Art in the Education Lab at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute commissions an artist to create an original artwork that invites and inspires community members to explore science through an artistic lens.

For her 20262 commission, Maya Ciarrocchi created a Jacquard tapestry that explored the question: what is the physical form of a memory? Developed through conversations with scientists in the Dmitriy Aronov Lab, the work draws on research into how black-capped chickadees form episodic memories as they store and retrieve food.

Informed by maps of the birds’ movements through their caching environments and the distinctive barcode-like patterns associated with their memory formation, the tapestry transforms scientific data and observation into a woven image. Bridging neuroscience and weaving, the work materializes invisible cognitive processes and invites reflection on memory as both a biological function and a spatial, visual, and tactile phenomenon.

Ciarrocchi also created a video/sound work as a time-based companion to the textile.