Abstract fiber artist Emily Barletta, currently based in Brooklyn, focuses her craft around two main themes: landscape and the body. Employing paint, paper, and yarn, her works explore an obsession with mountains, piles, and walls as well as bodily elements such as blood, flesh, and guts on a microscopic level. Barletta uses the visual logic of a grid, making it imperfect through the presence of her own hand. Barletta began work with fibers at The Maryland Institute College of Art and quickly found herself creating small hand embroidered and obsessively beaded sculptures. These earlier crocheted works referenced cellular structures, molds, and plant growth through the piece-by-piece accumulation of the crafting process. Barletta continues to contemplate the nature of repetition in her recent embroideries on paper which reveal a relationship between organic growth and human mark-making. While compositionally simple and conceptually complex, these formal abstractions fabricated from one or two repeated gestures explore the nature of repetition and mark the passage of time. Barletta regards her work as a vague expression of what she experiences in her day to day.
