Jennifer Markowitz

Lives and works in Raleigh, NC, USA

Artist statement

I use thread to map the geography of being lost. In my solo show, “Fleshmap: My Unravelling Geographies (2022)” I used silk and personal garments as canvas to embroider images and text pulled from memories, traumas, confusions, artifacts, and maps. Through the deconstruction of the fabrics, each garment reveals the absence of the body. Embroidery can physicalize memory. My series “America: 2020-2022”, shown in Reckoning and Resilience: North Carolina at the Nasher Museum (2022), reimagines seemingly mundane objects into signifiers of history. In several of those pieces, I used the drawn thread technique, a centuries-old form of decorative embroidery that involves removing a fabric's individual threads, then stitching into the empty spaces left behind. My chosen material, silk organza, shares commonalities with memory in that both can shift in appearance depending upon the light. In my series, “Dr. Charcot's Hysterical Women: Embroidered Traces of the Male Gaze (2023),” I used embroidery to reinterpret Paul Richer’s drawings that document treatments administered by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière in the late 1800s. Embroidered interpretations of these drawings and photos expose a mysterious complicity between those patients and doctors: a relationship of desires, gazes, and performance. Intense emotion and a tattoo-like quality of stitching can make a textile reveal the ways in which it was once touched --, like a suicide note or the lingering scent of absence....

Artwork