* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Textiles are in Lisa Kokin’s blood. Her parents were upholsterers, and she uses the techniques of sewing and book arts to create detailed, thoughtful work that often transforms found objects and words.
Lisa describes her work by saying, “Raveling is the thread from a woven or knitted fabric that has frayed or started to unravel. I chose this title for a series of thread pieces which I began shortly after my mother’s death in December 2011. My mother was five months’ short of her hundredth birthday when she died. She had spent the last seven and a half years in a skilled nursing facility. As her only child, I had looked after her and witnessed her slow and steady physical and mental decline, a difficult and at times emotionally wrenching process. The source material for the series are words, both written and spoken, from my mother’s last years and some from her last days. I also used the shapes of leaves that I gathered on the day she died and a photo of the two of us taken when I was six.”