My work grows out of a lifelong relationship with textiles, craft, and the quiet, expressive beauty of handmade things. My grandparents emigrated from Italy to New York City in the 1920’s where they worked in the bustling Manhattan garment industry. My grandmother—who had extraordinary skill in embroidery and fine needlework—taught me those techniques when I was a child. That experience formed my earliest understanding of quality, texture, and focus. Those roots eventually led me to the Fashion Institute of Technology, where I immersed myself in design, structure, silhouette, and material.
I subsequently studied ceramics under the auspices of a well-known, contemporary ceramic artist. I learned how to look at a design and reconstruct it repeatedly until it was unrecognizable from the original. Although the silhouettes of my garments remain recognizable, the fabric and threads are not, giving my work a more conceptual, playful and deconstructed form.
In 1999, my husband and I moved to Asia, where we lived for the next 21 years. During my time there, I became profoundly inspired by traditional Asian clothing—its luminous silks, sculptural shapes, and breathtaking embroidery. In Japan, I saw women wearing kimonos in the center of Tokyo. In Vietnam, girls seemed to float in their white ao dais. In China, I could view stunning silk robes once worn by emperors, as well as fashionable cheongsams worn on the streets of Hong Kong. Korean woman
wearing ethereal hanboks gracefully walked through the heart of Seoul and the women in India painted the landscape with their colorful saris. I experienced ancient fashion in a contemporary context.
All these influences found expression in my ceramic garments. Each design is built from hundreds of hand-cut ceramic pieces, each treated as a unique sculpture, stitched together one by one, by hand and wire. The conversion of soft cloth into a ceramic article of clothing creates a tension between fragility and strength, ornament and armor, all while the result is flexible, betraying the underlying rigidity of the material.
My work is ultimately about honoring the lineage of craft that shaped me, while exploring how a garment—something so familiar and intimate—can become an object of contemplation, resonant with both history and imagination. I think of my finished garments as vessels—forms capable of containing a person, a story, or a memory.
“Cocktails at 5” is my first piece of contemporary western fashion since returning home to the US. The cocktail dress is a nostalgic staple of my personal wardrobe and can be both playful and sophisticated.
With lightness and rhythm, using repeated motifs in warm and shifting bands of color, it is a re-design of the classic “little black dress”.
I am humbled that my work is held in private collections from Australia to China, Europe to the US. My tile garments are on display in The Middle House in Shanghai and the Changi International Airport in Singapore.