Seven Textiles

Melissa Joseph’s textiles are tableaus of memory — a family album in which silk images become substrates for felting. Her felt takes on the two meanings of the word to become both a material practice of composing vignetted stories and as an awareness of a physical sensation, of being touched sensorially and emotionally within the experiential domain of personal and shared memory. For Joseph, textile weaves family histories with themes of diaspora: the movement of bodies and construction of identity. Each of her pieces carries the memory of her father and his enthusiasm for fabric, patterns, and colors, as well as the material memory of his silk suits from India, which he held onto after immigrating to the United States. Joseph’s works become haptic, textured memorials to how we occupy space and how one is present in particular memories despite their seeming transitoriness. 

Like feeling the breath of a close loved one, Joseph’s textiles create the impression of an intimate and delicate warm breath of another. Although her felting technique often leaves the figures anonymized due to the lack of definition and obscuring materials, the viewer perceives their importance to the artist. In Haring Socks, the poised reddened toes, the folds in the white of the socks, and the swirling blue of the pant legs all in contrast to the vibrant pink amate bark paper and the brown weight of the doorstep make the simple act of waiting on a stoop important. It is this particular moment and space with the specific relationships between each of the elements that stand out in the artist’s memory — the pause and attention that comes at the moment the covered feet lift up from the step are as momentary as an inhalation or exhalation of breath, yet deeply meaningful. To create textiles is to weave fabric and stories together in one, converting memories and quotidian moments into objects and things to be felt. 

- Jessie Elizabeth Alperin