— bio

Addison Namnoum is an artist, educator, and curator based in Philadelphia, PA. She received her BA in Human Ecology at College of the Atlantic in 2014 and her MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2019. She has shown her artwork in Philadelphia and New York, and maintains a curatorial practice with AUTOMAT Collective.

— statement

Lucy Lippard wrote that place is the locus of desire. Possibly our hopes spring from there – our language, our bank of images. The nourishment of a life. I try in my work to approach these questions of longing and of loneliness, of being a part and apart, through the conduit of landscape, drawing on the languages of weather, waterways, and wind. I use the narrative structures of artist books and textile-based installation series to look at pattern and explore the ways we understand time as it relates to place. I’m interested in pattern as a sequence we make meaning from, but also as a decorative form and an important element of craft. 

In my recent series, Cloud Quilts, I experiment with the futility of trying to hold a moment still. Painstakingly I fix the hours of the passing days into these little squares, and I join them. Beyond the grid is the tighter weave of the sailcloth — it has its own logic of squares, of meeting places. Lifted up to the window, the cloth’s translucency lets the light in. Bare veils of color. Traditionally, quiltmaking is a feminine pastime. How have I let the time pass?