emma welty portfolio

united states

Emma Welty (they/she) first attempted to teach herself needlelace when she stumbled on Alice Odian Kasparian’s book Armenian Needlelace and Embroidery in a second hand store in Boston while attending Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Initially she struggled to understand the technique from print descriptions alone and put the book on her shelf. 

But a few years later while studying studio art and art history in graduate school at the State University of New York College at Purchase, she picked up the book again. She began researching needlelace for her art history coursework and eventually wrote her master’s thesis about the migration of needlelace to the Armenian-American diaspora after the Armenian Genocide. As she researched twentieth century needlework publications, she began to decipher the diagrams.

When Emma’s mother passed away, the drive to learn became fueled by grief. Having grown up as an assimilated American isolated from much of Armenian culture, Emma felt an urgent need to connect to her Armenian identity inherited by her mother. However, it was not until meeting the late Susan Lind-Sinanian, then textile curator at the Armenian Museum of America in Watertown, Massachusetts, that she gained momentum in building her skill. 

Lind-Sinanian had been a student of Alice Odian Kasparian, and her husband, Gary Lind-Sinanian—currently the Collections Curator at the museum—had created many of the illustrations in Kasparian's book. Susan Lind-Sinanian directed Emma’s hands in configuring the knots and shared other written resources, including Elena Dickson’s book Mediterranean Knotted Lace. Working with Lind-Sinanian was a life-changing experience for Emma: it was a breakthrough moment in developing her skill.

Emma’s maternal great-grandmother had been an Armenian lacemaker, teacher, and genocide survivor. She made needlace, crocheted lace, and Aintab drawn lace, but sadly, never taught the next two generations to make needlelace. Nonetheless, Emma remembers: “Seeing my great-grandmother’s janyak [needlelace] in my mom’s collection of family textiles was what first motivated me. It was a small, white cotton doily but I thought it was the most stunning and magnetic object. The fact that I didn’t know anyone at the time who practiced the technique made the work even more compelling.”

Born 1991, Emma grew up in Western Connecticut and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island. As an artist, Emma is currently working on a number of ongoing projects including a series of needlelace pieces made out of reclaimed fishing line. Because she read that lace emerged from a netmaking tradition, she thought it fitting to reconnect with maritime materials, while cleaning the beach in the process. 

She teaches fiber art regionally throughout southern New England and occasionally in New York and is the Lead Educator at the Windham Textile and History Museum in Willimantic, Connecticut—a museum that interprets the history of the thread-making industry in Connecticut in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Emma also teaches a short three-hour introduction to needlelace making course, but is seeking opportunities to provide instruction over multiple days or weeks.

While Emma has dabbled in various fiber and sculpture techniques over the years, lace making and tapestry weaving have become the pillars of her creative practice and much of her current work combines needlelace with woven still lifes, landscapes and text-based artworks. Now that she has been practicing and teaching for some time, needlelace has become more of a tool in her toolkit rather than a monument to a fixed moment in history. Emma comments: “I am motivated by the future of Armenian craft and how much there is left for us to learn from tying these knots.”

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