Art Radar #3: Threading Memory

Textiles as Narratives of the Self

Welcome to this week’s edition of Art Radar, where we dive into the tactile, the intimate, and the memory-laden works of three artists. Gvantsa Jishkariani, Maddie Duda, and Margot Peer each transform fibers and textiles into evocative conduits of personal and collective storytelling. Whether through kaleidoscopic explorations of girlhood nostalgia, hyperrealistic cross-stitches, or deconstructed tapestries evoking collective upheaval, these artists invite us to rethink the materiality of memory. Their works remind us that textiles are not just objects of decoration or utility but also vessels of vulnerability, narrative, and transformation.

Gvantsa Jishkariani

Georgian artist Gvantsa Jishkariani seems to have a extraordinary ability to distill the anxieties of a generation into physical forms. Her work—part tapestry, part mosaic, part digital collage—feels as though it’s in constant dialogue with the past, the present, and the precarious, glittering uncertainties of the future. While her practice spans mediums and techniques, it’s her tapestries that have caught my attention most. Jishkariani approaches tapestry as a battlefield, where tradition meets disruption. Pieces like Pain of the Defeated and Fragile Democracy explode with color and texture, their surfaces layered with tension, as though they’re holding together the frayed edges of history itself. Transforming the tradition of tapestry into a statement of resilience and critique, such pieces contain their eponymic phrases embroidered in either vibrant colors or black, juxtaposing the softness of the medium with the harshness of its message. They combine frayed edges, decorative motifs, and dynamic, untamed textures, hinting at the persistence of struggle in collective memory.

Born the same year that Georgia declared its independence, Jishkariani grew up during a period of political and economic upheaval, a reality that seems to have shaped her artistic practice. There’s a rawness to her work, an honesty about fear, failure, alienation, and the occasional escapist fantasy of a mythical garden—universal feelings rendered specific, even intimate, in her hands. Her tapestries are born out of destruction—literally. She shreds, tears, and distorts the very techniques that underpin these works, only to adorn and rebuild them into compositions that are both deeply personal and sharply political. What makes Jishkariani’s tapestries so compelling is the way they draw you in with their undeniable beauty, only to hit you with their underlying discomfort. The traditional craft elements evoke a kind of nostalgia, but the artworks themselves—bold, surreal, chaotic—pull you firmly into the contemporary. They’re tactile and tender, yes, but also unapologetically brash, as if to say: This is what it feels like to live right now.

Maddie Duda

Maddie Duda is a multimedia artist whose work feels like an invitation to step into the kaleidoscopic landscape of memory. Duda combines painting, sculpture, and sewing to create hybrid pieces that are at once maximalist, theatrical, and deeply nostalgic. She weaves together second-hand materials, childhood trinkets, glitter, and vibrant color palettes to explore the bittersweetness of girlhood and memory. The collage I Still Dream About My Old House layers fabric fragments and intricate embroidery to recreate the sensation of longing for spaces that no longer exist. Duda’s meticulous stitching draws the eye to the surface of the work, where texture becomes as important as the imagery itself. In Card Tapestry/Memories put on stage, a cascade of playing cards and small, glimmering objects forms an abstract yet tactile narrative, weaving together disparate elements to conjure a sense of suspended time.

The artist also engages with fashion and wearable art, with pieces such as her Queen of Hearts top, a vintage corset transformed into a tableau of fantasy and nostalgia, with ornate beadwork, sequins, lace, and of course—playing cards. Such whimsical details and layered textures evoke the surreal, dreamlike quality of Alice in Wonderland, where the boundaries between reality and imagination blur. Her work, rooted in material memory and storytelling, offers a colorful, glittering reflection on the fluid, abstract nature of the past, inviting us to linger in its vibrant and bittersweet spaces.

Margot Peer

Margot Peer is a mixed media artist whose hyperrealistic cross-stitches transform deeply personal photographs into universally resonant images. In Cross Stitch of Me Crying in My Bathroom When I Was 16, the artist reimagines embroidery as a vehicle for raw personal narrative. The piece, rendered in meticulous rows of thread, juxtaposes the rigidity of cross-stitch patterns with the chaotic vulnerability of teenage despair. Each stitch, evenly spaced, feels like a small act of control against the entropy of adolescence. Hugging Myself offers a tender counterpoint, exploring the quiet intimacy of self-comfort. Childlike, colorful sewn drawings scatter across the fabric, while lengths of thread cascade downward, unraveling from behind the tightly stitched surface and pooling in a multicolor fringe.

Works like these blur the boundaries between photography and textile, capturing raw, intimate moments with an almost photographic precision. Peer’s ability to translate the fleeting—teenage heartbreak, self-soothing gestures—into tactile, textured forms speaks to a fascination with time, growing up, and the weight of nostalgia. Her work invites us to reconsider the possibilities of embroidery and its capacity to tell stories that are as much about self-reflection as they are about collective experience. ∎