river detail

RIVER is a weaving of a 1915 map of the official deportation route of the Turkish Genocidal Death March onto which my grandmother Anna, age 15, her mother and little brother and sister were sent.  After her father was killed they were sent from their home in Sivas onto this choreographed exodus. The route intersects the Euphrates River where her 11 year old sister, Pompoosh, overcome with hunger, cast herself into the rushing waters. In some areas this great river was rerouted with Armenian bodies creating a human dam. This woven map decomposes into Anna’s actual lacework, rerouting the atrocity into her unwavering affirmation of life and culture.