cradle to grave full — ELEONORA EDREVA

ELEONORA EDREVA

Projects:

re-
inearth/unearth
At each doorway,
Yelling Pillow
Cradle to grave
re-patterning slowly
The sound that surrounds
Once upon a future
A Garden...
Windy Season
Eau Doom

Video Work
Writing

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Cradle to grave

2023

Cradle to grave is a naturally dyed textile work connecting two stories of ecological and personal grief through the symbol of the chestnut tree. The work emerged from a mourning ritual I did for my grandfather, who I had only met a handful of times in my life. Each year when my family ate chestnuts, my mom told us a story about his connection to them, associating the two together in my mind. Our familial tradition of eating chestnuts was also one that stemmed from our immigration story - chestnuts being a common winter food in Bulgaria and throughout Southern Europe. They are not so commonly eaten in the U.S. today, likely as a result of the dramatic mass die off of the American chestnut tree in the early twentieth century due to a fungal infection known as chestnut blight. Prior to this, the American chestnut was an incredibly abundant tree in the Eastern U.S., serving as an important source of food and shelter to animal and human communities. It was referred to as a “cradle to grave tree”, as its wood was used for everything from the cradles that newborn babies were rocked in to the caskets in which the dead were buried.

In this piece, I’m thinking about how we can use personal stories as entry points to engaging with larger ecological or social stories that might otherwise feel overwhelming to face. Can emotions like grief (or anger, disappointment, loneliness…) serve as fractals we can use to journey between inhabiting individual and collective understandings of self?

The textile work is accompanied by a printed takeaway offering a mourning ritual based on a traditional Bulgarian belief that the soul of someone who has passed away stays on Earth for forty days following death.

Reclaimed cotton, silk, and wool naturally dyed with chestnut bark extract, Cotton and silk threads hand and machine stitched, Wet-felted wool, Cotton gauze, Beeswax candle drippings, Blue postage stamps, Cyanotype of 100 year old lace, A postcard from Venice, 26 gifted words, 2 Bulgarian lev, 1 euro, 1 European Chestnut, 1 small mirror, Poplar dowel, Wool yarn dyed with coffee and red wine, 40 day mourning ritual: performed by me and offered to you, endless copies. 36”x50”, installation dimensions variable.