Lisa Kokin | Art made from thread

Welcome

This website strives to be accurate and complete. It represents a large part of the work I have completed since 1990. Although it is rather vast in scope, there are many pieces in each body of work that are not included. On occasion I accept commissions for private and public collections. Please send me a note if you are interested in a commission.

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Sewing & Alterations

Facsimile

The story of this work begins with the twelve boxes of books that I inherited from my grandfather via my mother. Schlepped from house to house, Brooklyn to Long Island to Florida to California – a uniquely twentieth century Jewish-American itinerary – these treasured books are my literary and intellectual heritage.

At first I thought that I would alter some of the volumes – sets of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Flaubert, Wilde, Whitman – to give them a new life and to prevent the certain fate that awaits them at the book recycling center or worse, the landfill. I gave myself several months to gather my courage to do this, only to realize that I was incapable of making the first cut.

Instead I began to make faux pages and page spreads using the trimmed-down zippers that I had snagged at a fabric give-away months before. The first pieces were generic book pages, small, even, single-column blocks, made of just zippers and thread, with no reference to specific texts. After several months, the work entered the realm of specificity when I decided to work from particular books and to incorporate fabric as a substrate.

I began with four different text sources: the aforementioned boxes of my grandfather’s books (Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman); dictionaries (because I love the way they look, their illustrations, obscure and archaic words and the fact of their sad and inevitable demise in the digital age); Jewish history (my divergence from all-or-nothing stance towards Israel); and democracy (recent Supreme Court decisions involving the unlimited use of money and disenfranchisement to determine election outcomes).

While in the past I have used readable text, in this work I have substituted text for fragments of stripped-down zippers, with their attendant metaphors of concealment, closure, and impenetrability. The zippers themselves are often not “read” as such, as they are bundled by thread. It is only by reading the titles and source texts that the viewer has an inkling of the content.