My participation in the current group show The Golden Thread: A Fiber Art Show, curated by Bravin Lee at NYC's South Street Seaport brings a multiplicity of various reflections and revelations.
Looking through this exuberant show I realized that my earliest experience with abstraction was through fiber arts. I grew up in communist Bulgaria and social realism was the single permissible style in painting. Even as a child I found these paintings of party leaders, workers and machines oppressive and frightening. However I was fortunate to attend the School for Applied Arts in Sofia and study with some amazing female textile and fiber artists who openly explored abstraction incorporating constructivism, cubism and even futurism in their compositions. These women found freedom in the peripheral condition of their material which connected them both to folk knowledge (intentionally being persecuted and erased) and to the post-war conceptual and formal developments of non-objective art happening beyond the "Iron Curtain".
This show also brought me back to working with John Lee and Karin Bravin
who were the first dealers to notice my work and give me a show in NYC in 2011. I created the "Men" series (collaged mulberry paper constructions) and the massive "The Battle of San Romano" for the show which was reviewed in the Village Voice. The first of these was "Crooked Man" inspired by a sculpture by H.C Westerman (which I am not sure still exists) of a coffin for a crooked man. These works on paper led to my experiments in sculpture, and "Undone Man" is their 3-D iteration in steel, fabric and concrete.
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