Nelli Nedre

Selected Projects

• 2026 — ongoingMaternal Line1 image2026 — ongoing+

  Maternal Line marks my return to textiles, embroidery, and handcraft through an exploration of my own family history. The starting point is a portrait of my grandmother, the first work in an evolving textile family tree.

  For generations, women on my mother’s side have practiced different forms of needlework. Rather than introducing a new artistic language to tell their stories, I choose to continue a practice that already belongs to my family history, one that was passed down to me and that I hope to carry forward.

  Through this project, embroidery becomes both a material and a living family archive: a way to explore memory, care, inheritance, and the transmission of knowledge between generations.

  

• 2025The Imprint of MotherhoodIn collaboration with QariQris8 images2025+

  The Imprint of Motherhood explores how becoming a mother transforms not only a woman’s body and everyday life, but also her creative identity. The project brought together my ink drawings of my son, photography, a personal essay, and small practices of preserving family memory.

  Motherhood became a kind of artistic studio for me a space for observation, experimentation, and a new attention to everyday life. Through drawing my child and preserving photographs, embroidery, letters, and small objects, I explore how ordinary moments become a personal archive.

  The project was created in collaboration with a jewelry brand QariQris for a collection dedicated to the connection between mother and child.

  Read the essay

  The Imprint of Motherhood

  The word “imprint” means a physical mark left by touch.

  I love this definition because it captures, with surprising precision, what happens to a woman after she has a child. The imprint is felt in a body that changes. It lives in a soul that grows deeper, and in a mind that is now forever connected to a small life that depends on you.

  But the imprint I feel most strongly is another one: the mark motherhood has left on my creative self. It has become part of the way I express myself and move through the world.

  Even before my child was born, my life was entering a new chapter. I changed careers, immersed myself in art, and spent many days in the studio. My pregnancy was an incredibly creative time. I worked with my hands, drew, visited exhibitions, discovered American art, and gradually began putting together a new version of myself.

  When my son was born, this process only intensified. He became a force that opened the world to me in a new way. His presence taught me to notice details, to be amazed by simple things, to be honest with myself, and to try something new. More than anything, he gave me the impulse not to wait for the right moment, but to create here and now.

  Motherhood became not only a challenge, but a true artistic studio for me. It helped me see what really matters and let go of what no longer did. Perhaps it also became the bridge to the version of myself I had been searching for for a long time.

  I want to support every new mother going through her own transformation. Sometimes motherhood feels overwhelming, sometimes too chaotic. But it is within these everyday moments that we, too, are being born: as more honest, more resilient, and more creative women.

  I truly believe in allowing ourselves a little lightness. In making space for play, experimentation, and small creative attempts. Creativity does not require silence or perfect conditions. It often emerges in the middle of real life, among daily responsibilities, embraces, questions, and first discoveries.

  Motherhood leaves an imprint. Sometimes it can feel sharp, and sometimes unexpectedly tender. This is part of its power. It reminds us that we are changing, growing, and moving forward alongside our children.

  Most importantly, this imprint can be preserved.

  Sometimes as a photograph. Sometimes as a small drawing or a piece of embroidery. Sometimes as a note, a keepsake, or a piece of jewelry connected to an important moment.

  What matters is taking the time to stop and notice.

  Below are a few of the ways I preserve these imprints of life with my son. Perhaps some of them will inspire you, too.

  • A pendant with the imprint of his hand
  • Photographs by the ocean
  • Embroidered handprints of my son and his father
  • My sketches of my child
  • Notes and letters to him

  

• 2025Behind the Scenes of Clothing ProductionMA Thesis · School of the Art Institute of Chicago20 images2025+

  Behind the Scenes of Clothing Production is my graduate research project examining the lives and labor of immigrant seamstresses working within small, independent fashion businesses.

  Drawing on more than fifteen years of experience in the fashion industry, including over a decade running my own sustainable fashion brand, I used autoethnography, interviews, personal archives, and case studies of art and activist practices to examine clothing production through the people whose labor makes it possible.

  The research became an opportunity to reconsider my own position as both a former business owner and an immigrant, and to reflect on questions of privilege, responsibility, labor, and inequality within the fashion system. One of its most important conclusions continues to shape my artistic practice today: sustainability begins not only with materials and production systems, but with empathy, care, and the human relationships we build through our work.

  The thesis brings together personal experience, research, and art-based practices to consider how art can make invisible labor visible, preserve individual stories, and create space for more ethical and caring ways of working.

  

• 2023 — ongoingDrawing in Nature20 images2023 — ongoing+

  This project began in Armenia in 2023, during a period of emigration and profound change in my life. I began regularly going into nature to draw, creating large-scale works directly within the landscape. Drawing became a way to process displacement, regain a sense of stability, and build a relationship with the places where I found myself.

  I grew up surrounded by forest, and nature has always been an important source of strength and belonging for me. During emigration, this connection became especially significant.

  This is an intentionally ongoing project. I continue my drawing practice outdoors in California and see it as something that will evolve alongside me throughout my life.

  

• 2021HandKaterina Sokolovskaya × NNEDRE8 images2021+

  Hand is a textile sculpture created in collaboration with artist Katerina Sokolovskaya and the NNEDRE team for an exhibition of emerging artists at the Richter boutique hotel in Moscow. The work revisited one of Sokolovskaya’s early sculptures, reimagining it through recycled materials and the context of sustainable fashion.

  The sculpture was produced using textile remnants from NNEDRE’s clothing production, transforming manufacturing waste into an artistic material. The project explored how collaboration between artists and designers could create alternative uses for leftover materials while drawing attention to waste within the fashion industry.

  Hand was presented in the 2021 exhibition If You Love It, Let It Go in Moscow.

  

• 2020 — 2021No FearNNEDRE × Upsala Circus6 images2020 — 2021+

  No Fear was a participatory project created together with teenagers from Upsala Circus. Through a series of workshops, participants worked alongside artists, designers, and curators from the State Hermitage Museum’s contemporary art department, creating drawings, texts, and visual stories that later became the foundation of a NNEDRE collection.

  For me, the project extended beyond a fashion collaboration into an experience of collective art-making, where participants became co-authors rather than subjects of the project. The collection was produced on demand to avoid overproduction, and all proceeds supported Upsala Circus.

  

Curriculum Vitae