Qualeasha Wood’s art mixes the hyper-contemporary with the ancient. She’s a tapestry weaver, yet her subject is online culture, her aesthetic is glitchy, and her works reference everything from Ozempic to Lorde lyrics. When we met with Wood, she was preparing for her second exhibition in Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in Mayfair. Her tapestries were still being carefully mounted on the gallery’s walls and a bed lay empty in the corner. “It’s called Attention Economy,” Wood told us as we stood over the bed. “I’ll be performing the act of bed rotting for the opening of the show.”

Wood’s vocabulary is steeped in online culture, a lexicon that would be instantly recognisable to anyone raised on the Internet. Born in 1996, she openly discusses how the Internet has shaped her entire personality. It’s still the place she goes for answers, for comfort, for affirmations and for attention. Outside of her practice, she’s constantly on Discord, streaming video games, or doomscrolling on TikTok. When discussing her work, she casually uses extremely online terms like looksmaxxing, datamoshing and bed rotting, and references previous works that mixed the lyrics from Charli XCX’s Brat with Kamala Harris’ infamous “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” speech.

Her bed rotting performance was exclusively for the audience at the show’s private view. Like many of her works, the performance explored ideas of voyeurism and surveillance, of burnout and fatigue, and, as the title suggested, the attention economy. Walking around the exhibition, there is a sense that Wood’s work is best understood by people whose screen time is well above five hours a day. Her tapestries are a flurry of cursers and browser windows. Often there’s text in the form of command lines. There’s also a real sense of horror.

One of Wood’s works in the show is titled Chopped N Screwed (2025). In it, two ghostly figures are seemingly being consumed by digital glitches. All of the figures in Wood’s tapestries are versions of Wood herself. “This is a scene from my bathroom,” she explains. To create the piece, she set up multiple cameras on her laptop, phone, and iPad, filming herself singing along to Halsey’s Ghost. Then she began deleting properties of the video’s text file, allowing the video to degrade, deform and glitch out. Capturing screenshots from the distorted video, she then overlapped them on Photoshop, leading to the final artwork’s glitchy, datamoshed aesthetic.

Most digital artists would stop there, printing and framing the final glitch edit. But for Wood, this is just the beginning. She creates all of her works on Photoshop and then feeds the images into a loom. The process of weaving one of her tapestries is about two weeks. She then has to painstakingly embroider any text separately, working letter by letter. The process is slow but incredibly rewarding. Mixing such hyper-contemporary technology with jacquard tapestry may seem at odds, but Wood tells me that the two have always been linked. The Jacquard punch system informed Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, usually referred to as the first computer, and Silicon Valley in the early days relied on indigenous women’s weaving expertise to develop microchips. In Wood’s words: “There’s always been an overlap between technology, textiles and women’s domestic work.”

Qualeasha Wood: Malware is running at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery until April 26th.