Cyrilla Mozenter is a New York-based artist known for her hand stitched industrial wool felt freestanding and wall pieces that include the transplantation of cutout letters, letter-derived, and pictogram-like shapes, as well as her hybrid works on paper, incorporating drawing, writing, painting, and collage.
[1] Mozenter has worked with a variety of techniques and materials ranging from the ready-made to the hand-made as well as from the nearly imperceptible[2] to the bold and graphic over the course of her career, however, her consistent focus has been described as the interior landscape of thought.
[7] Myrtle leaves, allspice, arnica, beeswax,[8] Chinese laundry soap, dried eggplant skins,[9] walnuts, hazelnuts, fruit pits, string, lima beans, sugar cubes, thread, and peanuts are among the unlikely materials that Mozenter used in her work in the 1990s.
In Drawing Papers #8, curator Elizabeth Finch writes, "Mozenter speaks of the bar of soap as a renewable resource—solidly inert at one moment and luxuriously expansive the next—in perpetual re-creation despite or because of its eventual demise.
"[13] The artist has used Stein's words directly in works on paper, but also as titles, notably of four exhibitions: Very well saint at The Drawing Center, (2000), Cuts and Occasions at Dieu Donné Papermill (2002), More saints seen at Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2005), warm snow at Adam Baumgold Gallery (2010), and warm snow: Sculpture in Two and Three Dimensions at Garrison Art Center (2014).
Felt first appeared in small beige bits as collage elements in works on paper along with Band-Aids, wooden ice cream spoons, toothpicks, and popsicle sticks.
In the catalog for Endpapers: Drawings 1890-1900 and 1990-2000 at the Neuberger Museum of Art, curator Judy Collischan wrote, "Her unusual materials...suggest the margins of life that are erratic, unpredictable and capricious occurring in spite of our continual attempts to maintain order.
As described by curator Jessica Hough: Cyrilla Mozenter's small-scale sculptures, made primarily from cream-colored felt, have an elegance and spirituality that belies their material fabrication.
Felt—a textile of ancient origin used now in industry as well as children's crafts—along with discarded ice cream spoons, scavenged from urban sidewalks, speaks to the everyday; silk thread and carefully-placed pearls hint at the devotional quality with which the maker has imbued the objects.
Mozenter has noted, "the doomed attempt at regularity of the hand-stitched seams" that reveal both strength and vulnerability, simultaneously provoking and resisting felt's natural inclination to buckle, stretch, droop, and torque"[20] and the attentiveness and improvisational engineering required to stabilize each work, enabling it to both sit flush with the ground and stand up.
Metaphorically, they appear less scarred than repaired or replaced..."[23] Combinations of letters rarely spell a recognizable word, but instead suggest sounds and the types of breath required to make them.