Involuntary, Repetitious, Obsessive

Abstract

This thesis traces my experience of discovering my mother's heirloom textiles from her Armenian grandparents after her death in 2015. Initially I rejected these objects as representations of a domestic landscape marked by hatred and violence toward women. However, driven by a desire to take ownership of my cultural heritage and the historical legacies at play in my own craft practice, I ultimately found kinship with these objects and their techniques in order to forge my own story of cultural preservation and family legacy. Combining the traditional Armenian rug knot, the Ghiordes knot, with research from folklore, proverbs and theoretical texts regarding trauma and cultural memory, I transcribed fragments of written texts into woven structures that challenge the legibility of the original words, simultaneously hiding and revealing meaning. The interconnected threads of intergenerational trauma and matrilineal narrative traditions are represented in the fibers woven together to form a new cloth.