STATEMENT OF WORK

I am inspired by architecture as a vehicle for revealing personal and communal histories. As a sculptor, I've built a symbolic architecture of patterned miniature forms influenced by carpets, quilts, and other traditional Middle Eastern and American crafts. I've employed a variety of materials, from clay to paper to plaster, to present histories of urban or environmental landscapes, or delve into more personal narratives, sometimes incorporating oral histories into my work.

Overall, my sculptures can be seen as utopian landscapes–an attempt to bring order and beauty to my surroundings, to organize the anarchic disarray of forms and textures around me, as well as the histories embedded within them, into a harmonious whole.

More recently, I’ve been memorializing my grandmother through a series of reliefs and a table-top sculpture using materials related to her dual passions of religion and dressmaking. My related collages present a devotional space that has elements of the medieval and futuristic. They are first sketched through the playful misuse of found objects as stencils. Though the drafting is precise, the process is intuitive; the structures that I draw purposely hover between architecture, altars, totems, and diagrams. This work includes references to my Yaya like: dressmaking patterns and embedded religious imagery and words. Some aspects of the collages, such as the vine-like forms and use of gold, are reminiscent of medieval Armenian manuscripts.