Ancestral Fibers

Some of the fibers in my installation have been cultivated by members of my family for many generations. The linen, cotton, and wool that I use were brought over from Russia, the country of my childhood. As I interact with them, I feel a tactile connection to the hands of my ancestors. As they sat through the long Siberian nights, weaving textiles and stories, they forged a connection through time and across generational divides.

While so many connections fade away in the modern world, I want to connect myself to an ancestral weaving of tradition, materials, faces and voices. These voices appear in my art as interlaced nerves, veins, and plant roots. As I crochet, stitch, and work with felt, it feels good to know that I am continuing the work of my mother, grandmother, and all the women before them who made textiles for their family. Tradition is like a woven cloth whose end is never finished, but rather left open so that the next generation can take up the loom. I strain to hear my ancestors’ voices and synchronize with the rhythm of their hand movements. As I work, I hum songs the songs my father and mother sang when I was a child.

Embodied memories

The memory of touch is precious to me: the velveteen surface of mushrooms found under a tree, the smooth skin of my child and the rough hands of my blacksmith grandfather. I recall the rough and soft fur on young and old sheep that grazed in my grandfather’s farm. All these are tactile, not verbal memories; they inspire my work and the choice of materials.

My grandmother’s room was covered with old pieces of clothing that she gathered from friends and neighbors to make her fiber art - rugs. Brightly colored ones were especially treasured. I would go to sleep and wake up to the sound of the sewing machine. Our bodies contain such memories; they are embedded in the skin. These corporeal memories can be recalled only through something tangible and multisensory: something that has texture, color, smell, and a certain aura. The fibers contain remembrance of hands that touched them and of eyes that looked at them. My work unlocks the embodied memories for others: to make a connection, the viewer must access the store of her own memories, and to recall her own sensory experiences.

Making

I do not approach material with a pre-formed idea; rather, the work of art emerges from my intuitive interaction with each material. In this sense, my art is not conceptual. I see my works as living plants. They become a part of the natural world as they grow and take shape. Making is simply helping materials take form.

Even though we live in an age of precision technology, I want my works to look like they are actually made by a human hand. Perfection in art gives me the feeling of looking at a mechanically reproduced work, which always lacks the aura of an object shaped by touch. Through making art, the artist externalizes herself into objects outside of her own body, projecting her fragile humanity into the inanimate.

My objects reach towards history, not perfection. I embrace the stray stitches and the decay that is always already present inside a work of fiber. A fiber piece reveals its history as it wears out and frays at the edges. It humbles itself before the ebb and flow of time, which is inscribed in it. This is why organic elements are prominent. The color, texture, and shape of a tree leaf reveal its temporality, its place within the life cycle. The mutability of nature is reflected in the fragility of my objects, which completes and questions the durable beauty of our glass-and-steel world. This is a special kind of making, the making of the imperfect; it is a process of creation that takes precedence over the object of creation.

Ritual

My desire to create objects stems ultimately from an attempt to connect. My ancestors migrated to Siberia from the Ukraine. My nuclear family has now migrated to America. How do I connect my Ukrainian and Siberian ancestors to my American children? What thread is strong enough to span over continents and centuries?

The rituals we inherit enable us to connect with the past by drawing our attention to the sacred aspect of material things. Rituals go back to the primeval connection that existed before language. They transcend Babel and the pain of separation brought about by language, connecting us to our biological oneness. It is to this place of ritual and animality that I retreat to make my objects, which emerge into the world untainted by the isolating discourses of modern life.

My childhood was saturated with rituals that linked me with the passage of time: collecting mushrooms, berries and medicinal herbs, cooking, singing, sledding, and gardening. Stitching or crocheting is like the process of writing, tracing a narrative letter by letter. It is a mesmerizing physical process consisting of identical, ritualistic motions. Like the connecting threads in my work, rituals connect our spiritual lives to the rhythms and cycles of nature.

Working with threads amounts to tying pieces of life together. My mother has a ritual of tying all fabric bags and sacks with knots, as if each knot had some protective power. It is her way of meditating. In my work, I want to tie things together and tie all people – here and there – together, as I want my children to be around me, to tie them to myself and to my heritage.

We are all dependent and interdependent. Whether it is God or Nature (the one is worshipped through the other, his creation, in the Orthodox faith), we all depend on a higher power and are thereby connected. Yet these connections are not automatic; they take human form only through the unhurried work of connecting. My work is a visual and tactile expression of this work.