wool-spinning ceremony (Sebastia, 1913)

Armenian women were taught from a very young age how to sew and weave. Very often they stitched to survive financially. My mother told me it helped distract her from the sounds of war and violence as a child growing up in Beirut during the civil war. Perhaps many of my ancestors' herstories are lost or undocumented, but when I hold my great-grandmother's needlelace in my hands, I can literally hear the songs of untold stories, the silenced pain that they sewed into their craftwork. Through a creative restoration process, they were able to access what was taken from them, what was erased, a divine love, a cosmology that might seem lost in primary texts and written histories - but exists in the spirit of textile nonetheless. Somehow, by weaving death into cosmic, circular, orbit-like patterns of needle-lace and embroidery, life was weaved back into/through them in return - thus mimicking the symbol of the spiral, the death-life-death/life-death-life pattern.