About
I create talismans like textiles for the feminine in all of us, turning everyday materials into raw, guttural objects that evoke mystery, the sense of touch, our lived experience through cloth.
From an early age I connected with the tactile and making with cloth and paint, inspired by female ancestors, old New Englanders and Armenian alike.
I am inspired by textiles as artifacts, cloth as an embodiment of experience as well as my own personal history of Armenian textile and cultural traditions. Fragmented, the pieces act as talismans, unsolved tangles. Made from scraps, the work is in a sense, itself a scrap, cast off from a larger whole.
My materials are yarn, old fabric, discarded plastic, cardboard, paper, paint and wax. The work is often abstract but can take the form of clothing. Attracted to repetitive processes such as stitching, knitting, crochet, I manipulate the work by altering, distorting, layering with wax, dye, and paint.
Made from ephemeral materials, both flexible and delicate, I reference the unheroic, women’s work, the spinster obsessively stitching her thoughts in the corner, secret fetishes, the mind’s distortion of facts. A tale told through fiber.
The Orchard
In 2006 my husband, Andy Brennan and I bought an old homestead farm in the southern Catskills of New York State. What began as a homestead orchard became Aaron Burr Cidery, an experiment to replicate America’s original table beverage: cider made from wild, uncultivated apples, unaltered, unrefined, never-compromised.
