I grew up in Massachusetts, summers on an island in Maine, a year studying in Paris
and three years attending graduate school in the Southwestern United States.
From an early age I was drawn to the tactile, making with fiber and paint,
inspired by female ancestors, old New Englanders and Armenian alike.
I love history and see textiles as artifacts, cloth as an embodiment of experience..
My work uses yarn, old fabric, discarded plastic, cardboard, paper, paint, wax, dirt and apple waste.
Often abstract, the work can also take the form of clothing or soft sculpture.
I want the material to speak through the sense of touch. Attracted to repetitive processes
such as stitching, knitting, crochet, I manipulate the work by altering, distorting, layering.
Fragmented, the work is talisman-like, an unsolved tangles. Made from scraps,
the work is in a sense, itself a scrap, cast off from a larger whole.
Fiber, natural fiber and natural materials are ephemeral, flexible, yet durable.
In this sense I reference the unheroic; women’s work; the spinster mad stitching in the attic;
secret fetishes - the mind’s distortion of facts.
In 2006 I moved to the southern Catskills to a 200-year-old homestead farm with my husband, Andy Brennan.
Together we planted an orchard among the 10 old trees on the property.
The orchard now holds over 1000 trees with both known cultivars and the truly wild.
In 2011 we began Aaron Burr Cidery, a cidery dedicated to remaking the America’s historic drink: cider.
Made solely from uncultivated fruit and nothing else, the drink, dry (read tannic) and unapologetically sharp (read acid), represents the land we inhabit.
A born New Englander and a granddaughter of Armenian genocide survivors, I am dedicated to slow processes of handmaking, thrift, and an appreciation of history.
I continue to experiment with natural and recycled fiber, natural materials, and natural dyes
on my farm and in my environment.
photo: Evan Sung