Resilient Lace

These pieces began with a photograph. After my grandmother died, I found her among a group of women I never knew, a community of embroiderers in her village, trained by the nuns, sewing side by side. She had never told me. It made me wonder what else had passed through her hands into mine without either of us naming it.

That question took me to Burano, where I learned needle lace from two master craftswomen. A technique so slow it forces you to think differently, held in the body rather than in the realm of logic. Lace is a form of knowledge that only survives if it moves from one person to another; write it down, and it's already lost something essential.

The works shown here are what emerged from that process. Each stitch is a record of the hours spent learning, and of everything that came before those hours: centuries of women turning marginalized labor into a means of survival, self-organization, and quiet resilience. They are strive to be traces of a transmission still in progress.