Lee Malerich

I was around when the State Museum started early on and watched the building of this institution. And I think the state used it more often in the early days. It was the to go to the go to place. My embroidery work, which I call narrative embroideries or stitched histories, are really about what I was thinking about when I was here in South Carolina. Matchstick Men This piece is kind of an assertion of my singularity. I had gone through a divorce. I was feeling my freedom and liking it. I've always liked text in work, and through my 30 years of embroidery you can find messages and hidden texts in my works. These sentences are a bit more forward. You know, you can use symbols and have a discussion in symbols, but you can also just write it out if you think somebody is not going to get it, write it out. In this piece, along with all kinds of activity happening, is a saint in an oval near the top of the piece, which is my own invented named saint. Call for help announcement. That's what it's about. The piece called "Work" is done also with the sewing machine preliminarily, but it's more quilting and has no hand stitching in it at all. And I kind of have a gimmick with that way of working. Whereas with the embroidery it's just, you know, here's your picture plane and you work wherever you need to work. During the time I was making this work, I also was really enamored of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. It was really exciting and it was big, it was on nice paper. I would cut words out of it, decorative things, pictures, sometimes statements, sentences. These pieces were more fun to do than serious work for me.