ali cat portfolio

united states

Ali Cat (she/they) is a Portland, Oregon based self-employed artist. As a printmaker, they are proficient in screen-printing, relief printing, and letterpress. Ali also makes zines, often hand-bound (i.e., sewn); her relationship with needle and thread continues to deepen through making needlelace, teaching others, and developing a multidisciplinary lace-based project, “Entangled Roots Lace.”

As impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic were unfolding worldwide, at the age of thirty-two Ali was invited by a dear friend of hers to participate in an online janyak (“lace” in Eastern Armenian) class taught by Emma Welty, through the group Armenian Creatives. Ali’s learning was aided by Alice Odian Kasparian's book, Armenian Needlelace and Embroidery, which gave much guidance on their learning journey, as is the case with several other diasporic makers featured on this site (e.g., Welty, Mikayla Kurkjian, and Elise Youssoufian). 

Interestingly, before learning to make needlelace, Ali had never done any Armenian needlework. It is difficult to learn; initially, they excused their inability to take to it naturally by reasoning that it was not in their lineage—or so they thought. It was not until more than a year later, when a Palestinian friend invited Ali to co-host a monthly SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) stitching circle that she picked it up again. Through this circle, she committed to the craft; around that same time, her mother gifted Ali some of her great-grandmother's lacework.

As is the story for many Armenians living in diaspora, very few heirlooms were able to be saved when Ali’s family fled from ancestral places. With maternal roots in Bitlis, a historically significant city in the Armenian kingdom of Van (present-day southeastern Turkey), Ali was born in 1988, in the wine country of Napa Valley in California. Her birthplace is just a few hours north of the agricultural center of Fresno where her great-grandparents settled after escaping violent waves of ethnic cleansing in Ottoman Armenia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the Napa Valley, Ali did not grow up in an Armenian community, and the language was not passed to them. While Armenian food and coffee always had a place at the table, other folk practices were lost. Though Ali’s great-grandmother, Nuvart, made needlelace and crocheted lace, Ali is the only one in their family who has learned to make lace in her generation. While there is general appreciation of tradition in the family, there does not seem to be much interest in the needlelace from their young relations.

For Ali, the lace serves as a reclaiming of a cultural practice and a remembering of an art form that was intimately part of our ancestors’ lives. She notes that the lace, “originally part of every home,” was “turned into a commodity” and is “now a thread in our collective remembrance.”

They have taught one needlelace workshop in person and will probably do so again. They have also taught many folks one-on-one at Portland’s SWANA Stitch circle, a monthly space for practicing ancestral craft and building SWANA community and solidarity. Meeting monthly for over three years, SWANA Stitch has fostered friendships, creative projects, mutual aid, ancestral reclamation, skill-shares, and lots of laughter. About the circle, Ali affirms: “We are open to all skill levels—whether you’re a master crafter or have never stitched before. Our space is for the folks who come to it and stitch together.”

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