Water is the Solution to Almost Everything: Emma Welty In-Person
Textile artist Emma Welty's Water is the Solution to Almost Everything will be on display in the Gallery Space for November. The exhibit includes recent textile works including janyaks (needlelace) made of reclaimed fishing line, woven text art, and woven land and seascapes. The fishing line used in this body of work was combed on the Rhode Island shoreline and untangled slowly over the course of the last two years. The work is meant to link the history of Armenian lace with its ancient roots in net-making, and to consider shorelines, both locally and globally, and to whom they are made “public.”
Emma Welty is a textile artist, researcher and educator. Welty completed a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Fibers and Art History and an MFA/MA in Visual Art and Art History at Purchase College.
Welty’s work utilizes ancestral traditions of Armenian weaving and needlelace to explore economies of labor, notions of “heirloom” and cultural transmissions within a SWANA diaspora. Welty had held residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design and the Newport Art Museum and recently exhibited work at Overlap Gallery, Jamestown Arts Center, Museum of Contemporary Art: Long Island, Heirloom Gallery, and the Newport Art Museum.