there’s eclectic and there’s eclectic, right? and there are probably thousands of philadelphia apartments full of kitchy, fun, retro stuff. nikki has plenty such things… but nikki’s belongings are focused. and almost every tiny trinket or talisman or remembrance she owns is one pin on the larger map of her body of work. i think “obsession” is a terribly overused word, particularly when used to describe a creative person’s muses. but nikki lives with her memories, and her chosen iconography, in an almost militant and tireless way.
i met nikki when her beloved grandmother was on her deathbed. in the time following nana’s death, nikki constructed an enormous embroidered portrait of a matryoshka doll. it was nana who taught nikki to embroider, and their shared russian heritage is a huge part of her work, and so much of that culture was presented to her by her nana.
needlework is also a huge part of nikki’s family endowment. she has memories of watching aunts, great-aunts and great-great aunts, making doilies: crocheted, knitted, or with a tatting shuttle.
for the not a stitch exhibit, one of the projects nikki has completed is the honoring of her nana, great- and great-great aunts on her mother’s side of the family (nine in total) and the thirteen aunts on her father’s side of the family, by designing handcut paper doilies named for each of them. they are like soliders to me.
and so much of nikki’s home, where she creates her work, is like this — like this kitchen-within-a-kitchen. lives inside of lives. she’s like a human dollhouse, where inside the dollhouse, there’s another dollhouse.
another of nikki’s projects for not a stitch is the recreation of several significant household textiles of her childhood — as papercuts. for these she has used gouache, hand-tinted to match the fabrics, painted onto kraft, and cut by hand. “if i could have made the paper i would have done that too,” she said.
that is the nature of evocation/invocation that is the lynchpin of this exhibit. to love a piece of fabric or needlework so much that you would recreate it in other forms, just to get closer to it.
i have seen the preparations for a dutch-landscape curtain papercut, a crocheted afghan, and some cowgirl fabric. i’m so excited about seeing the finished work. it’s a lulling waiting, like nikki describes her memories as a child, lying in her great-aunt’s living room, watching the oil “rain lamp”. as a mother now i know it is just moments like that, that change a kid’s life — and create artistic perception. it’s so exciting to see it all brought to life here.
