Woven Time

A piece of cloth, worn thin by time, breathes across the frame like a memory half-remembered. This fabric once belonged to my grandmother’s mother-in-law, gifted as part of a wedding trousseau over a century ago. When I was thirteen, my grandmother placed it in my hands and taught me how to embroider. The tiny, trembling flowers stitched into its surface were my first attempt, my first language in thread. I didn’t know then that pulling a needle through fabric was a way of listening, of remembering, of making something live again.

Years later, I returned to this cloth not with a needle, but with a camera. I placed a printed portrait of myself beneath it, letting its translucent folds veil my image, my face submerged in generations of touch and silence. The fabric doesn’t just conceal, it reveals, reshapes, connects. It becomes a quiet conversation between past and present, between hand and image, between what is seen and what is felt. A small act of remembering, stitched into the fabric of now.

“Woven Time,” New York, 2025 © Negin Mahzoun