Boro Land is an evolving world. It takes from this world in the form of the unused and discarded, the overlooked and the worn out, and remakes them into something entirely its own. Each iteration of the series grows from the last, incorporating new materials, new processes and new histories into a body of work that has been building since its first presentations in Japan, accumulating layers the way the tapestries themselves accumulate fabric: one piece at a time, nothing wasted, everything transformed.

The Sertoma Arts Center presentation marked the Raleigh premiere of Boro Land: Layered Worlds, and it brought with it a significant new development in the series. Working with the cyanotype process, Cooley sourced old pieces of textile and infused them with light-sensitive emulsion before exposing them to sunlight, the sun itself becoming a collaborator in making images that emerged from the fabric before that fabric became part of the larger work. The resulting pieces carry a quality unlike anything else in the series: deep Prussian blues, forms appearing as though developed from within the cloth rather than applied to its surface, the cyanotype's particular luminosity pressing against the warmth of the hand-dyed and hand-printed fabrics surrounding it. The process extended the logic of Boro Land into new territory while remaining entirely faithful to its foundations. Every material used had already been somewhere. Every surface carried a prior life. The cyanotype simply added another layer of history, the image of the sun recorded in the fabric itself.

Among the works making their first appearance in this presentation was Five Aspects of Venus, a five-panel installation of tall vertical tapestries whose figured forms, assembled from patterned and plain fabrics in deep blues and ochres, brought a monumental scale and a ceremonial quality to the series that earlier works had approached but not quite achieved. Each panel is its own complete presence, the five together forming something closer to an altar than an exhibition wall, the figures within them constructed from the same accumulated fabric logic as all of Boro Land while reaching toward something older and more formal in their bearing.

The exhibition also incorporated fabrics sourced directly from North Carolina communities, the series continuing its practice of weaving local materials into a body of work that has traveled from Japan through New York and Pennsylvania to arrive here. Each location leaves something in the work. Each version of Boro Land is both itself and a record of everywhere it has been, the histories of its materials and the histories of its journeys stitched together into surfaces that grow richer with every new addition.

The Sertoma Arts Center's Raleigh Room is a generous and expansive space, its high ceilings and long walls giving the tapestries room to occupy the walls at the scale they were made for. The works hung from their bamboo rods across the full length of the room, each one a world built from what another world had set aside.