Sewing Kit (2025)

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In Sewing Kit, the dark loose thread, decorated with spirals, pins, and marbles, winds around the frame of the paper; the object, in my eyes, stems from the Greek myth of the three fates. The trio are godly old crones who could weave and snip a thread to begin or end someone’s life.

Recently, I took a trip to Los Angeles and stayed with my mother. We spent the days having a coffee on her front stoop, running errands, book hunting, and carting things home from the farmers market; This was a sudden recreation of my Florida childhood acted out in the many sprawling blocks of LA.

While cutting up these new apples, I thought of the sinking and darkening areas of the skin if gone uneaten, and I thought of keeping the doctor away. How the fruit is a referent to health and we can see the apple disappearing. I thought about the same way we prefer to have things in the kitchen, how we look down with the same eyes."

— Natalie Lerner

Natalie’s work combines the mythical with personal experiences, emotions, and memories—all of which inform the atmospheric and often calligraphic forms she depicts.

In Sewing Kit, Natalie recalls a visit with her mother in Los Angeles and examines the complexity of life, life cycles, and the passing of time. The visit reels in older memories from Natalie’s childhood, and the resulting image is a dreamscape. Here, Natalie depicts a swirl of threads and in her own words relates them to the threads held by the three Fates. Greek mythology hypothesized that our ties to the physical world were like a thread suspended and controlled by these three Fates who, with one sharp snip, could detach anyone’s connection.

Although the thread is a symbol of the life force in Greek mythology, in our daily lives we use thread to repair, mend, and unite. A metaphorical thread is also what connects us to our ancestors, our culture, our pasts, and each other; and I can’t help but to imagine these traditions, memories, friendship, and kinship as pins, marbles, or knots along Natalie’s thread waiting to be discovered, or remembered, by someone down the line.