Carson City resident Maria Mermin, a multi-disciplinary artist who has created fiber works to produce sculptures, is displaying multiple tactile projects in the Brewery Arts Center Satellite Gallery through September in her exhibit, “Fiber Wall Sculptures: Stories Bound in Twist & Stitch.”
Photo by Jessica Garcia.
Carson City artist Maria Mermin has a fascination with colors and string. She brings both together to represent memories and stories in compelling sculptures that can speak to anyone in different ways.
Her sculptures might incorporate beads, seashells, stained glass, rope, bolts or other items she’s been inspired to use, but everything has a purpose and it’s very demanding.
“Creativity is a funny thing,” she said. “It can plague me if I don’t do it. I get annoyed because the color is not quite right.”
The Brewery Arts Center Satellite Gallery, recently located inside the new Visit Carson City office at 716 N. Carson City St., has on display Mermin’s works that have been included in the exhibit “Fiber Wall Sculptures: Stories Bound in Twist & Stitch.” It is Mermin’s third public display of wall hangings of fiber works, woven with colorful string and personal items she’s collected throughout her lifetime into individual, thematic works of art.
Mermin was born in France on Oct. 11, 1939. In 1959, she came to San Francisco, married two years later and went to Berkeley. But in between those years, she and her husband traveled back to Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea, and she had developed a passion for art. They visited museums.
“I always had this craving for strings and I wanted to learn how to knit but nobody showed me anything,” she said.
Her father, from Ukraine, was a weaver of fabric to support the household and her mother made baskets. Growing up, she developed a tactile desire to learn how to weave, knit and crochet but didn’t have a proper instructor until she finally traveled to Israel, she said.
“There was a big artistic community there, and I looked over a window and there were so many looms,” she said. “I found a weaver. I learned the basics real well. But then we came back to the Bay Area and I went to Berkeley and took a tactile class.”
But even as she grew up learning the mechanics of weaving in Israel, she had been limited to what she called the “rigidity” of a Gilmore loom and eventually she found herself frustrated without the freedom to pursue her own creative ideas.
“I wanted more texture, and I wanted to feel the strings,” she said. “There’s something in me that wants the tactile. When I came here, my husband, who died a few years ago, I was by myself, so those projects (in the exhibit) are all during COVID. It takes about five to six months (to complete). It’s very time-consuming.”
She said the inspiration often comes and goes and she often stops working for months at a time. But even if the artwork often takes a pause, she remains social anyway, thanks to her friends through the program.
Patricia Best, the BAC’s Exhibition Hall manager and volunteers coordinator, said she first met Mermin at a performance by the Divas, a local group of singers, and bonded with her by taking road trips. Best, who had moved from California, said Mermin has shared her traveling experiences and her work with her, for which she had a natural affinity for her art. Best and Mermin have common interests including tennis, hiking, snowshoeing and Mermin has been dubbed a “pickle ball queen.”
Best said Mermin’s investment and commitment into her work have to come together just as she envisions.
“The first time I saw Maria’s work, she had been visiting her son and family in Santa Cruz, and she had been staying nearby and she saw this lonely Icelandic poppy in the gravel or cement crack and came home with an idea,” Best said. “But I watched her create that (into a sculpture) over six months, and it was coming together and then the next time I could see it, half of it would be gone because it didn’t satisfy her inner art. The colors weren’t right. So she put it back together and it’s magnificent.”
“That flower looked so dejected, and Icelandic poppies are usually so glorious,” Mermin said. “But this one felt like she was among the cactus, dejected. I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to make you beautiful.’ ”
Best added she’s quick to highlight the personal aspects of Mermin’s projects.
“I point out to people there are little pieces of Maria’s friendships and memories hanging within (her DNA) sculpture, and I know a few of them, so I point them out,” she said, including Mermin’s daughter, who lives in New Zealand. “And you feel all of that energy, and it’s right where I sit and work.”
Mermin said she describes her work as “healing” after the loss of her husband.
“I was still mourning the loss of my husband even though he was gone for quite a while,” she said. “It affected me really deeply. I want to give something to heal, and if you look at those things and have this idea in your head, you can see some places where it would speak to you in that fashion.”
Best said she was excited to share Mermin’s work with Eric Brooks, VCC’s arts and culture program manager, and to make it a possible exhibition for the BAC Satellite Gallery the first time. Brooks, who has served in other capacities in Northern Nevada coordinating mural festivals and gallery programming through the Sierra Arts Foundation and Reno’s Art Spot, said Mermin’s work helps to highlight a plethora of local and regional talent in the area. Her work is inclusive and accessible while highlighting the city’s historical and cultural roots, Brooks noted.
“It’s a treasure to have someone with such a talent in our small community and willing to share your work and your story,” Brooks told Mermin.
“You got me out of my rabbit hole,” Mermin said.
An artist reception and open house is planned for 4 to 6 p.m. Aug. 23 and is free to the public.
The gallery’s 2025 exhibition season is as follows: